Moeneeb Josephs’ passionate rant on TV has earned him even more respect from people around the country.
On Sunday after Wits lost to Cape Town City in the MTN8 semifinal, the goalkeeper said straight up that there was a lack of desire and hunger from the defending champions.
It looked like he had tears in his eyes when he questioned the commitment of his teammates to the cause and also the hunger to want to do better.
Here’s some of his quotes from that interview: “It’s how we go about things in our games, that lack of desire, that passion, that hunger to want to win games - that hunger to do anything to get a result.
“It seems as if we’ve won enough. We won the league last year and that’s it.
“Most of us are first-time winners of the league so that hunger and passion is gone, you can see it. Cape Town City deserved to go through. If you look on paper, they cannot match what we have but they have the hunger and the desire.
“We’re not willing to run harder, to work harder we don’t deserve to be in the final.
“We can’t just think we are going to win games with the players we have, we need to put it on the field as well.”
For me this little speech, which has gone viral for all the right reasons, has basically summed up the heart of the problem with South African football.
Josephs went on a similar tirade against Orlando Pirates players last season.
He won back-to-back trebles with that club and has said the current crop are more concerned with Instagram than being out there on the playing field.
It is unbelievably hard to explain how professional players don’t have that winning desire, the right amount of passion to put their bodies on the line.
For me this is especially true when it comes to Bafana Bafana.
The players say all the right things in the media, they talk about working hard and being prepared. But it’s all talk.
When they go out there and lose twice to Cape Verde, a nation that has the same population as Mitchells Plain, they show us that Josephs is right.