“These are days of miracle and wonder,” sung Paul Simon in “The Boy in the Bubble,” off his wonderful 1986 album, Graceland. The words are widely applicable but for the purposes of this week’s episode, I’d like to relate them to South African sport in the last 12 months.
In the year between February 2023 and February 2024, for instance, six South African teams either won or reached World Cup finals, reached World Cup or continental semi-finals or hustled out of the group stages of World Cups to make the round of 16.
In order of success, the teams are as follows: the Springboks, who won the Rugby World Cup final against arch-foes New Zealand in October, winning the final 12-11 in Paris.
Six months before that our women cricketers reached the final of the T20 World Cup at Newlands, beating England in the semi-finals before losing to Meg Lanning’s Australia.
Of the semi-finalists, there were three. The Proteas, after winning seven or their nine matches, including wins over England, New Zealand, Pakistan and Australia, in the round-robin phase of the men’s World Cup in India in October, lost to eventual winners, Australia in the semi-final. The SA under-19 men, reached the semi-finals of the under-19 World Cup on home turf, losing a close match against India at Willowmoore Park by two wickets.
Within a day of the under-19s going down to India, Bafana Bafana, after beating 2022 World Cup semi-finalists, Morocco, in the round of 16, played against Nigeria in the semi-finals of the Africa Cup of Nations in the Ivory Coast.
Here they had the better of the first-half, the worst of the second-half and a little luck to force matters into extra-time with the score stuck at 1-1.
So the score remained through both halves of extra-time, which brought us fans face-to-face with the second penalty shootout in as many matches. In the previous shoot-out, against Cape Verde in the quarter-final, Rowen Williams, the Bafana skipper and goal-keeper, had mesmerised the opposition penalty-takers to such an extent that he knew where they were going to strike the ball before they did.
Such mind-reading brilliance seemed to have deserted him by the time the Nigerians came along. Now they seemed to know where he would dive before he did, which, I’m sure you’ll all agree, is despicably handy for a penalty-taker, but less good for the shot-stopper himself.
In the Nigeria penalty shoot-out Williams took an eternity to work out that perhaps not diving and standing still was the best way to approach a save.
It’s counter-intuitive, I know. ‘Keepers are trained to dive; Williams clearly wanted to demonstrate intent and command of the situation by diving. Only not-diving was the way to go, because in not-diving, Williams had the best chance of saving.
If he dived – strange as it sounds – he had no chance saving at all, because so many of Nigeria’s penalties were banged straight down the middle. To dive or not to dive, that was Williams’ question, a question that hadn’t bothered him in the slightest at midnight on Saturday night against Cape Verde.
As we all know now, Williams religiously chose the former against Nigeria – he dived. And so the ball went past him. And Nigeria went past Bafana 4-2 on penalties to go into the final. Never has diving been more fraught.
Of all my six examples, Bafana are a strange case, a case that even Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson might have difficulty solving. What can we say about them for sure? Our cricketers and rugby players certainly don’t have to go to Khartoum or Rabat or Yaoundé or Bamako on a regular basis.
Neither do they have to deal with strange accommodation, rowdy local fans, young soldiers in camouflage brandishing shiny weapons.
Most of all they don’t have to deal with appalling pitches and dodgy referees. It used to be a bit of a plague, and recently the plague has come under the authorities’ control. The standard of refereeing in the Ivory Coast has generally been very good, but you never know what might happen on a sultry afternoon in Dakar, when the continent has dozed off under the shade of a marula tree and the cameras aren’t looking.
It’s both comforting and sad to think that under Clive Barker Bafana were once ranked 16th in the world. Barker’s team frightened Germany; they took Brazil close and battled it out, blow-for-blow, with the Netherlands.
But Bafana’s Afcon and World Cup form has been patchy ever since. In the last 20 years, qualification for neither tournament has been assured. Bafana’s run under coach Hugo Broos, and Williams, spellbinding between the sticks, has been a long-overdue fillip to the nation.
All the more so because in November, Bafana lost a 2026 World Cup qualifier 2-0 away to Rwanda. They also have Nigeria in the 2026 World Cup qualifying group, so that’s going to be fun after Wednesday night’s penalty loss in Bouake.
The last team of the six teams mentioned earlier is Banyana Banyana. They clawed their way out of their World Cup qualifying group in New Zealand last winter, after losing by a goal to eventual third-placed side, Sweden, and drawing 2-2 with Argentina.
In their last match they needed to beat Italy to have any chance of qualification through to the next round. They left it late, Thembi Kgatlana, scoring the winner against Italy in extra-time. In the second round, Banyana were beaten 2-0 by the Netherlands.
All of this adds up to a remarkable year, a year, in point of fact, of “miracle and wonder”. It’s very possibly even more remarkable than remarkable because the federations which run these sports are not always high-functioning. Sometimes they hinder, rather than help.
Cricket South Africa (CSA) handled the David Teeger matter clumsily in taking the captaincy of the national under-19 team away from him for comments he made at a Jewish Achiever’s Function in support of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Such heavy-handedness couldn’t have helped Teeger or the side, although we shouldn’t be too certain about this.
They might have inadvertently helped the side a great deal; the team could have bonded around an external threat or perceived injustice. CSA might have helped the national under-19 considerably, although not in ways they were meant to.
About 15 kilometres across town from CSA, the SA Football Association’s (SAFA) have their headquarters next door to Soccer City, the stadium that hosted the World Cup final 14 years ago. Beset by financial difficulties, with a revolving door of chief executives and 52 countrywide regions to oversee, SAFA seem to shuffle rather than soar.
Their executive, in this age of streamlined boards, numbers 45, with six honorary members. That’s 51 patches to protect, 51 sets of eyes to see the world through. It’s not a recipe for bold and beautiful decisions, and didn’t help them solve the crisis on the eve of the World Cup that saw them and the players get into a spat about who would pocket what winnings.
Danny Jordaan, who seems to be president for life, has been in the position at SAFA for over 30 years. He seems to remain so through a very Jordaan-like concoction of charisma, patronage, bungling and the lack of anyone brave or plausible enough to succeed him. You want to yawn but, then again, yawning might finally be too much trouble.
I find it interesting that Patrice Motsepe’s ascent to the Confederation of Africa Football (CAF) presidency bypassed Jordaan entirely. Jordaan has his fiefdom, while Motsepe gazes down upon an entire continent with the peacefully content eye of the true lord. Finding Jordaan an obstacle in the road, Motsepe got on a plane and simply flew over him.
Motsepe now has the position Jordaan campaigned for and always wanted. His success must be galling, because it is surely a reminder of Jordaan’s failure. The realisation on Jordaan’s part that he has nowhere to go, means that he’s all the more likely to overstay his welcome by staying exactly where he is. A recipe for dynamic leadership, it is not.
The allegation of a low administrative bar in South African football is not always easy to uphold. Bafana’s success in the Ivory Coast stands as unique insofar as their players are mainly home-based. Whether they play for Mamelodi Sundowns, Orlando Pirates or Stellenbosch FC, football, through the auspices of the Premier Soccer League (PSL), seem to be doing something right. Maybe this is no more than coach Broos’ pragmatic decision to make Sundowns players the spine of his side?
Almost of South Africa’s successful sportsmen and women in the year we’re looking at campaign overseas, so the PSL stands alone for being an incubator for a national team. Kgatlana, who scored the winning Banyana goal against Italy in the World Cup in 2023, campaigns in Mexico. Many Springboks play in Britain, France or Japan.
The cricketers, while all of them are home-based, participate in overseas competitions like the Indian Premier League (IPL) and The Hundred on an annual basis. Heinrich Klaasen and Lungi Ngidi’s success at the World Cup in India in October was helped by knowing Indian conditions. This is because of Klaasen’s connection with the Sunrisers Hyderabad. Ngidi plays his IPL cricket with the Delhi Capitals, and both of them play in the SA20.
South Africa’s women cricketers, like Marizanne Kapp and Laura Wolvaardt, are similarly feted with overseas teams and franchises, Kapp playing for the Oval Invincibles and Wolvaardt for the Manchester Originals in The Hundred.
The last five years in international cricket have been years of competition growth. The Hundred, the SA20, along with competitions in the Emirates, the US and the Caribbean mean that South African players are both nationally-contracted and free agents. They are exposed to the best white-ball cricket in the world more regularly than any other South African sporting generation has been.
The momentum generated by increased sporting opportunities and, therefore, regular international exposure outside of bi-lateral series, is increased by the fact that for a younger generation international sport is a given way of life.
Wolvaardt is a couple of months short of her 25th birthday. She was born in April 1999, at about the same time that a young cricketer called Graeme Smith was beginning to get Ali Bacher all hot and excited about a successor to Hansie Cronje. Smith’s record-breaking side of ten years later was a feature of Wolvaardt’s cricket background. Jacques Kallis was clearly the player upon whom she based her very Kallis-like cover-drive.
I remember doing a story about Matthew Brittain, the rower who helped South Africa’s lightweight coxless fours crew to rowing gold in the 2012 London Olympics. Brittain was born in May, 1987, and he remembers sitting down to watch Josia Thugwane win gold in the men’s marathon in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with his parents as a nine year-old.
The following day he got into his gym shorts and vest and, in a fit of inspiration, started running round the garden like a crazy thing. His mother was perturbed and came outside to ask what he was doing. “I told my mom that I was running because I wanted to go to an Olympics. I’d been so inspired by Josia. I saw him as an innocent and liked the way he went about it. That time was pivotal as an athlete.”
Brittain’s quote is slightly deceptive, so requires explanation. At school he was an athlete, and rowing was light-years away. But he was born into a rowing family (his father was a competitive international rower in the isolation days) and was drawn into the sport through the family culture.
The important thing for me is that the nine year-old Brittain in shorts and vest didn’t know what he wanted to go to the Olympics as. He only knew he wanted to go to the Olympics. The goal preceded the means by which the goal would be reached. Desire is everything. The rest isn’t easy. But it is secondary to the dream.
The Olympics were so inspirational for javelin-thrower, Tazmin Brits, that she had the five Olympic rings tattooed on the inside of her right bicep. The tattoo wasn’t idle boastfulness on Brits’ part. As a 16 year-old she had won the women’s javelin event at the World Youth Championships in Ostrava, the Czech Republic. The 2008 Olympics was too close, so she looked to the London Olympics four years later to make her senior Olympic debut. These were the very Olympics that Brittain and his crew came from nowhere in the take unexpected and dramatic gold.
Brits was on track – as it were – for selection, when a malign hand tapped her on the shoulder. It reminded her not to get ahead of herself. In November, 2011, with her training for London well on track, Brits was driving from Potchefstroom back home. She had been out with friends, having a good time, and forgot to fasten her seatbelt. The road was dark, the hour late.
For a moment Britz looked down at her phone to see her messages and her car veered crazily off the road. The next thing she knew was that she’d been catapulted through the windscreen. The car she’d been driving had landed right on top of her. She couldn’t feel her legs – at all. The panic of it all makes her cold, even today.
The accident left her with a broken pelvis, a dislocated hip and a punctured bladder. Shortly after she came to, she heard her mother crying. Her mother was there in the stands at the stadium in Ostrava in the Czech Republic in 2007 when she had thrown her way to the gold medal in the World Juniors. Brits heard a familiar voice shouting through the noise of the crowd. She was inspired on her last throw and comforted now.
Yet her mother couldn’t take away the nagging pain. Or the nagging fear. Was she going to be a cripple? Was she ever going to walk again? Was she going to become a beggar with a little metal tin? Was she going to become one of those sad people you see being wheeled around the shopping centre for a Saturday morning outing?
Brits was in hospital for three months. By the time she got out in early 2012, her Olympic dream hadn’t simply receded, it wasn’t there. It had gone, disappeared, like a raincloud in the summer sky. Sometimes she thought that the tattoo of the five Olympic rings wasn’t such a good idea. It reminded her of somewhere she’d never see and never get to.
The three months in hospital were bad enough the time out of hospital was worse. Brits needed to put her life back together again. Her sponsors, so eager to get on board in the run-up to the London Olympics, deserted her to a man. It got so bad, the fall from being a world junior champion to being a complete nobody, that she attempted suicide. And she didn’t attempt suicide just the once. There were times when Brits had no further to fall.
And then she picked up a cricket bat. She had watched the boys playing cricket at Klerksdorp High. She’s always wanted to give the game a go. She found that she had a good eye and although her back was fragile and often painful, here was a sport she could actually play.
She couldn’t throw the javelin, but she could run and run between wickets. And she could catch. She needed some direction in her life and started to become more serious. What was the worst that could happen? Nothing worse than what she’d experienced could happen.
So she was safe to try and try cricket on for size. Slowly, so slowly that at first she didn’t even realise, she started to enjoy her tattoo of the five Olympic rings on the inside of her right arm. It reminded her of what could’ve been. That wasn’t so bad after all.
Brits’ team started poorly in the T20 World Cup in South Africa last year, losing narrowly to Sri Lanka in their opening fixture. Her team said it was a wake-up call, and she believed them, she thought it was a bit of a wake-up call herself.
In their next game they bowled New Zealand out for 67 to comfortably win the match and, although they lost to Australia, they were able to improve their net run-rate in beating Bangladesh to qualify as the group’s second-placed side.
The semi-final against England was Brits’ London Olympics 11 years late. First she scored 68 as South Africa posted a competitive total batting first. In the field, where-ever she was on the leg-side, she was remarkable, as she took four catches.
The second of them was the best, the one Pommie Mbangwa called “magic” and the one that nearly had Nasser Hussain bouncing out of his seat. Shabnim Ismail bowled Alice Capsey, the England number three, a short-pitched ball and Capsey, eager to get off the mark, attempted to pull. The ball was upon her quicker than expected and the shot looped in an unconvincing top-edge in the general vicinity of square-leg.
Brits, fielding at mid-wicket, sprinted for the catch. Diving full stretch she stuck out her right hand just before the ball landed on the turf. Capsey was out for a duck and England lost the semi-final by six runs. Brits took the four catches that helped the first four wickets to fall.
Home ground advantage was a theme for some of South Africa’s cricketers, but some of the teams who’ve been successful over the last year have had to play in either challenging or appalling conditions. Banyana’s World Cup opener was played in cold and rain in Wellington. The Springboks arrived in France in summer. They were there for so long that they by the time they reached the final it was autumn. It has been so hot in the Ivory Coast that Bafana and all the other teams have had to have mid-half water breaks.
What is surely happening is that sporting success is developing its own logic – it is creating a tradition of sporting success. The Proteas in India were inspired by the Springboks in France; Brittain was inspired by Thugwane. When Brittain grew up he went to the London Olympics, the very Olympics Brits had hoped to go to before her accident.
Her Olympics took on a different flavour. They happened in a different sport. Instead of throwing the javelin she threw herself about, taking four catches to help guide South Africa’s women cricketers, widely joked about in some circles, into a World Cup final against some of the best women’s cricketers the world has ever seen.
Sportsmen and women are as impressionable as the rest of us, keenly aware of sporting success and failure in others’. The first team in our year-long cycle of success were our women cricketers, who reached a World Cup final, followed by Desiree Ellis’ team reaching the last 16 of the World Cup in Australasia.
The Springboks won the Rugby World Cup final in Yokohama four years ago, a not-to-distant reminder of not only what could be done but how to go about it.
Bafana have gained immeasurably by getting to the semi-finals of Afcon, gaining from the shop window that is the tournament, gaining confidence and institutional knowledge. It will hold them in good stead come the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, where Nigeria, the side who I believe will be 2024 African champions, lie in wait. Before we get too carried away, let’s not forget that later in the year it’s the Paris Olympics. Early predictions for medals are not good. Who knows? Maybe we’ve had our year of sporting success and fun and it ended in Bouake on Wednesday night.