Santana: the man with no answers, no plan

This week, I got a rare opportunity to ask the country’s most paid manager Joel Natalino Santana to explain his football philosophy to me and the rest of football scribes who had gathered for a post-mortem following the country’s failure to reach the Africa Cup of Nations.

“Clearly”, I told Santana, “we are not getting you coach. We need you to tell us your football philosophy so that we can understand each other,” I said.

Now, since I have been accused of player-hating the man, I thought it was apt for me to offer the man an opportunity to let us into his world and detail his blue-print for SA football, and possibly, in the process purchase some favour with the country’s football journalists who have been his worst detractors.

For a while, Santana said something we could not understand to his interpreter (is it not frustrating enough that we can’t communicate straight with the man before the message goes to the ‘middle-man’, I wonder how he talks to the players). I tried, and believe me I did so very hard, to listen to what he had to say. I was not impressed and may I say I was not the only one in the room who was not overwhelmed by the coach’s plans for our national team.

I left the press conferences with many unanswered questions: should I really trust the hands of the man who has been entrusted with the duty of looking after our most prized asset? Should I give him a benefit of a doubt? Should I tolerate him? Until when?
The stakes are just too high.

Santana told us that results do not concern him. What? Then if that is the case, why should I accept a man who embraces mediocrity to take charge of a team that has to perform and make the nation proud by 2010.

Santana, like his CEO Raymond Hack, speaks about ‘building for 2010” so profoundly that if these two men were getting R10 every time they used this excuse, they would be millionaires by now.

My question to Hack and Santana is, what if Bafana Bafana fails miserably in 2010, who will shoulder the blame? What is irritating about Santana is that he tells us the obvious; he recites the same script time and again. I’m certain, he must think we are either too stupid to buy that, or are simply blinded from reality.

What has become worrying about this current tenure is that, whenever one dares question the way things are done, he is classified as enemy number one and someone who “doesn’t like the coach.”

I said it then, and I will say it now, coaching a national team is not a popularity contest. We don’t have to like you, just do your job.

And, as for that Mr Hack, I don’t have to be apologetic.