Nickname: Bafana Bafana
Manager: Carlos Alberto Parreira
Previous World Cup appearances: Two
Best finish: Round 1
Key players:
Aaron Mokoena (captain)
Steven Pienaar
Benni McCarthy
If recent form is anything to go by, South Africa are in grievous danger of making an unwelcome piece of World Cup history.
Never before has a host country failed to progress beyond the first round of the tournament.
Yet the Rainbow Nation will go into the biggest event in their sporting history in complete chaos. Their FIFA ranking is in freefall and they even failed to qualify for the 2010 African Cup of Nations.
Carlos Alberto Parreira was reappointed as the team's sixth coach in five years in October 2009, just 18 months after walking out on the job. The veteran Brazilian succeeded compatriot Joel Santana – who had been recommended for the job by Parreira – after a disastrous run of eight defeats in nine matches.
And topping off all this turmoil nicely is the ongoing soap opera over whether the country's record goalscorer Benni McCarthy should be in the squad or not. The South African President Jacob Zuma thinks so, but successive national coaches have been less enthusiastic. The player himself doesn’t seem terribly bothered.
It’s all a far cry from the jubilant scenes of 1996, when South Africa rode a wave of Mandela-inspired euphoria to lift the African Cup of Nations.
The few remaining optimists left in South Africa point to the team’s gutsy performance on home turf in last summer’s Confederations Cup, in which they finished fourth. But in five games, the Bafana Bafana managed only one win, against the mighty New Zealand.
A cursory glance at the South African squad reveals what the country’s biggest problem is: a simple dearth of world-class talent.
Captain Aaron Mokoena and midfielder Steven Pienaar may be regulars in the Premier League with Portsmouth and Everton respectively, but the rest of the squad is sorely lacking in top-level experience.
More than half of them still play in the domestic Premier Soccer League, while the remainder spend much of their time on bench-warming duty at middle-ranking European clubs such as striker Bernard Parker at FC Twente, and Fulham’s Kagisho Dikgacoi.
Parreira, a World Cup winner in 1994 with Brazil, now faces a race against time to instil belief and a sense of direction into his ramshackle squad.
If the draw is kind and the nation gets behind them, then they stand half a chance of making it out of the group stages, and their tournament will probably be judged a success. If not, then the Bafana Bafana will re-write the World Cup record books for all the wrong reasons.
