Shakes Mashaba begrudgingly allowed the national Under-23 team to use the Cosafa Cup to prepare for the Olympics, instead of taking the senior national team there.
He admitted this yesterday at OR Tambo international airport as the team left for Namibia, where they will find out this afternoon if they play either Lesotho or Malawi as Group B winners in the quarter-finals on Saturday.
Mashaba, the last man to guide the Under-23s to the Olympics 16 years ago, was persuaded to look at the bigger picture because the team doesn’t have that many competitive matches to prepare for the showpiece in Brazil in August. After the Cosafa Cup, they will have several camps and a friendly with Japan on June 29, to build on their trip to Brazil in March.
“It’s a very good thing (to take the Under-23s), although I am not happy about it,” Mashaba, pictured, said. “We should have gone there with Bafana Bafana. I agreed partly because a lot of people advocated for it, to give the Under-23s this opportunity. But if things don’t go well, they won’t say that these are the Under-23s. They would have beaten South Africa. We have to be careful about that. I have always said that for us to be world beaters, we have to first conquer our region, then Africa and eventually the world.
“Yes, we know that the Under-23s are going to the Olympics, which is why we decided to give them this opportunity. If we go to the final, that gives us three matches at a highly competitive level. I agreed because the bigger picture is important. If they were to go to the Olympics without tough opposition, that would have deceived us because we would play small teams and we beat them 3-0, 4-0 but when we get there it’s a different story. Here, there is a lot at stake, including a trophy. Teams who come here want to return home with it.”
The last time Mashaba left with a team to play in the Cosafa Cup, he returned with the trophy when the Under-20s won it in Lesotho in 2014. Rivaldo Coetzee and Tebogo Moerane are the only survivors of that team in the squad that will play in Windhoek. Coetzee became the youngest player to represent Bafana Bafana in Congo in 2014. Mashaba is using his story as motivation for this group to force their way into Bafana Bafana after the Olympics, where some could feature in the last Africa Cup of Nations qualifier against Mauritania that’s a dead rubber after the side failed to qualify.
“I told them the policy of Bafana Bafana,” Mashaba said. “If you show your prowess, that you’re a good player, it doesn’t matter what age you are. We will take you straight to Bafana Bafana. We have done it with Rivaldo. We are still looking at some other players who can show us that they can do it. The one thing I said to them is that we can put up a good team without any problems, because of the talent we have in this country.”
Mashaba will co-coach the team that is technically Bafana Bafana, with national Under-23 coach Owen da Gama, who also works as the Bafana Bafana assistant coach, taking the lead as he fine-tunes preparations for the Olympics. - The Star