I was 1000s of metres in the air when I started writing this for you ouens.
I was on my way to Istanbul, Turkey, to shoot my new show called #HolaGoal which will cover the Africa Cup of Nations currently happening in Egypt.
Get this, it will be broadcast LIVE on Twitter, the first African show to be flighted on the social media platform, EVER!
You can imagine the anxiety that I was experiencing, not only because the show must be successful but I’m also super desperate to make Bafana Bafana one of the headlines for Wednesday’s exciting debut.
So around 2am when I finished the first part of this piece, I had no clue how Bafana had played against Morocco.
I expected there to be in-flight Wifi, but I wasn’t that lucky. We landed and I saw the headlines which were obviously disappointing, but I had to see for myself what went wrong.
So I used the time I had because we had landed way too early and watched the match.
UNLUCKY: Thami Mkhize. Photo: Gavin Barker/BackpagePix.
Bafana did not play too badly, the problem is that they did not hit the target with the shots they took.
So it’s understandable if people don’t remember how close Percy Tau’s strike in the first half was for example.
As the underdog, the boys did what they needed to do for 89 minutes, until Thamsanqa Mkhize’s desperate tussle with an opponent saw him concede a freekick that resulted in the goal that may have ended South Africa’s journey at the tournament.
By the time you read this column you will know if Bafana are coming home in time to attend the Durban July or not.*
But let’s have a look at how we would’ve made progress to the last 16 easy for ourselves.
At the time of writing, we were one of the four best third-placed teams.
We, however, needed Group E’s top sides Mali and Tunisia to do what is expected of them and beat Angola and Mauritania, while Cameroon and Ghana needed to beat Benin and Guinea-Bissau for us in Group F’s matches.
We also have ourselves to blame for this situation because we failed to bury Namibia which would have been enough, because Angola may edge us because of a better goal difference.
And now here we are with our calculators and banking on other teams to do us favours when we could’ve finished the job ourselves.
This takes me back to how we prolonged the qualifiers by not beating the Seychelles away, a few days after beating them 6-0.
PAIN: Morocco’s Boussoufa. Photo: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters.
Why couldn’t we cause an upset like Madagascar did against Nigeria, bafethu?
It’s supposed to be us making the headlines and flying the Cosafa flag high at such tournaments.
We also can’t afford to have Percy Tau return home without scoring a single goal in Egypt after playing such a key role to get us there.
It wouldn’t be fair on the young man to not cap what has been a memorable 2019 with am Afcon goal at least.
We only needed a draw ouens!
*Bafana have since qualified for the last 16 of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations and we may still see Tau score a goal against Egypt on the Saturday, 6 July 2019.