SA Rocks

In spite of a dismal looking record in the Confederation Cup (One win in the whole tournament), Bafana Bafana under the leadership of Joel Santana proved that they have what it takes to stand up to the top football nations in the world and give them stick.

And stick is exactly what Spain and Brazil received (Spain twice).

Sadly Bafana was not rewarded with a victory in the final stages of the tournament and managed to finish 4th in the tournament behind Brazil, USA and Spain.

However I am still proud to say that it took 3 miracle goals to beat bafana in the 3rd/4th play-off and one of the best freekicks I’ve seen by Brazil to take us out of the semi-final.

Mphela played a magical game in the 3rd/4th play-off and put through one of the best freekicks under pressure in the final movement of a football match to take the game in to extra time (which we then lost).

Bafana has a good platform to start working from for the 2010 world cup coming our way next year. We are in a great position to look at how we played against 2 of the top 5 teams in the world of football. Joel Santana deserved a win, but let’s be honest he’s finally made South Africa look like a team, play like a team and become supported like a national team by a nation.

Well done to them all.

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The semi-final of the Confederation’s Cup 2009 was an absolutely thrilling game. Fifa’s 5th best team in the world required on the best pressure free kicks I’ve seen to beat South Africa, Fifa ranking of 77 at the time (now moved up 5 places to 72.

The fact remains that Bafana played a game like none they have played in many years. They looked like a top ten team and dare I say deserved to win. The truth is that they didn’t, and that’s OK with me because sometimes one needs to lose to learn. But the match that the Bafana squad played last night pulled a nation together and proved that we are on the right track.

To the coach, Joel Santana, my congratulations go out. He told everyone to judge him on the Confed Cup, well done sir, well done.

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One of my favourite websites on the Internet has to be Boston.com’s Big Picture.

Thanks to twitter I discovered that Boston.com features Soccer in South Africa as the focus of their pictures this week.

Here are two photos but for more you’ll need to visit The Big Picture – Soccer in South Africa.

Helen Daws commented: “BC Big Picture – Soccer in SA http://tinyurl.com/lkxdsk pity its so biased tho, not really the full picture”

To which I responded that I felt that it is a fairly unbiased view of football in SA as many, many South Africans experience football in the way depicted in the photographs.

What are your thoughts? What do you think of these photographs?

Popularity: 11% [?]