So on Sunday, an email from Safa Media landed in my inbox with the subject line: “REMINDER: Baxter to announce Bafana Bafana squad to face Seychelles.”
My head immediately went to Durban, where the MTN8 final between Cape Town City and SuperSport United took place.
This match, Benni McCarthy’s Citizens won and deservedly so, because they missed a whole bunch of chances in the 90 minutes and extra time and ended up doing it the hard way via the lottery of penalties.
I remembered watching central midfielder Thabo Nodada dominate not one but two of his rivals for a spot in the current Bafana Bafana squad.
One is a 30-year-old seasoned national team player, Dean Furman.
The other is 21-year-old former youth international Teboho Mokoena and the common denominator is the Bafana head coach Stuart Baxter who recently coached both when he was in charge at SuperSport.
Nodada, meanwhile, hasn’t had the same number of opportunities as the two chaps from Tshwane.
That’s not to say that the 23-year-old has not deserved a shot, it’s simply because he is the victim of a broken national scouting system, where youth and senior coaches are stationed in Gauteng and do not or rarely travel to other parts of the country.
A 20-year-old Nodada was one of the players who was retained by Cape Town City when they purchased the status of Mpumalanga Black Aces.
He was on the fringes of the first team in the first season when Eric Tinkler was in charge, but became a regular under Benni in the second
season.
He has hit the ground running as a key player in the current campaign, his third, and has been one of the top performers.
South Africa is blessed with talent in the central midfield position, where European-based players like May Mahlangu and Lebogang Phiri don’t even get mentioned.
The expectation in the Republic of Cape Town was that Nodada was the obvious choice when Andile Jali and Bongani Zungu pulled out of the squad injured for the match against Libya, but the Republic of South Africa national coach thought otherwise, as he called up and started Furman in the match.
Furman won the Man of the Match award in the 0-0 draw and we were treated to a lecture by Baxter, of how important Furman is to South African football, when he was questioned about selecting a midfielder in his 30s for a match that Bafana were expected to win anyway.
Bafana Bafana will play back-to-back fixtures against Seychelles, who are ranked a whole 189th by Fifa.
They are clearly the whipping boys in Group E of the 2019 Afcon qualifiers, with zero points, having conceded eight goals and scored only once after the two matches they’ve played so far.
Meanwhile, Bafana, who are second tied on points with Libya, have a really good shot to set the pace in the group, with wins in two games against the Pirates.
The national call finally came for midfield dynamo Nodada and was met with a lot of enthusiasm by the industrious midfielder as per his club’s social media.
Go get them ,Thabo!