Bafana Bafana head coach Hugo Broos has questioned the patriotism of the PSL after their refusal to suspend the DStv Premiership schedule earlier.
For months, Broos had been pleading with league to put the 2023/24 campaign on hold before Christmas, so the national team players could rest ahead of the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, which kicks off at the weekend in the Ivory Coast.
Bafana play their first match of the competition next Tuesday against Mali, having been in camp since the fourth of this month.
Broos, a former Afcon winner with Cameroon, has had an opportunity to assess his squad ahead of a friendly against Lesotho today before they jet off to the west African nation tomorrow.
The 71-year-old mentor expressed his worry at both the physical and mental implication the domestic schedule has had on his players, and therefore slammed the PSL for not supporting the national team’s cause.
“You know the discussion I had with PSL, honestly, all of these players were not really recovered,” he said yesterday in Johannesburg.
“You see that and we feel that, and that was my fear.
“You feel it in training and in the measurements we took, that the players were not 100% fresh, and
I said this eight months ago when I asked them to stop on December 24.
“Those players needed that, looking at the programme of games they had in the last two months and even from the beginning like Sundowns, they played nearly every three days from August to December.
“I’m sorry to say but don’t tell me they (the PSL) support Bafana Bafana because that’s a laugh.”
The last match in the DStv Premiership was played on December 31 as the Cape derby between Cape Town City and Cape Town Spurs rounded off the year.
The entire Mamelodi Sundowns contingent in Broos’ squad featured for the Brazilians a day earlier, while the likes of Sydney Mobbie, Jayden Adams and Ricardo Goss also made appearances at their respective clubs.
Broos refused to use his complaints as a crutch ahead of the continental showpiece, and instead expressed his confidence in his players’ commitment to the cause as well as in his technical team’s ability to find a solution to their problem.
“Don’t think now that (just because) the players are exhausted, so the performance should drop.
“We work very hard so that shows also the mentality of the players, that they want to deal with it but in the best circumstances, we should have done it differently.
“We spoke about it with the technical team and we have a solution in place.”
In the past, the candid Belgian has drawn huge comparisons between South Africa and his former Cameroonian side, expressing his belief that Bafana are ‘less of a priority’ in the broader domestic calendar.
Bafana have lost just one of their past 12 matches under Broos and have qualified for the Afcon for the first time since 2019.
The South African national team will also face Tunisia, and neighbours Namibia in the group stages of the competition.
IOL Sport