by Francesco Migliore

Excuse me while I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and stifle a yawn, for an advertisement for football it was not. On the contrary, it highlighted the risk football is faced with when one of the two teams decides not to play any football. In this particular game, Iraq arrived looking for a draw and were never going to allow the game to be in any way or form entertaining. Maybe a hang up from too many years under the Hussein dictatorship followed by the chaos of the American occupation, maybe they just did not believe they could ever win. Either way, they managed to place every man behind the ball for the entire 90 minutes and in the process suck all the joy out of the occasion. Considering the fact that they chose to play the ball into the South African corner from an attacking free kick, rather than try and steal a win in the last minute of play, is indicative of Iraq’s lack of ambition and sense of the occasion. Which leads me to ask; if they do not believe they can score against the hosts, a team notoriously iffy in defending set pieces, who the hell do they believe they can score against?

As for South Africa, they did what they could with limited resources, but in the end lacked the quality to dismantle the wall of white jerseys. And when they finally did manage an opening, they lacked the composure or the little bit of fortune required to put the ball into the oppositions net. The clearest example being Parker’s clearance of Iraqi lines with the ball goal bound from a Digkacoi header. Parker found himself between the ball and the goal and could not avoid the ball hitting the back of his legs and bouncing to safety. It was obviously not to be South Africa’s night, even though had the match been judged as a boxing contest, it would have been stopped as a contest long before the unfortunate incident.

Football is not boxing though and once the final whistle blew, Bafana Bafana realized that they had just lost an opportunity to allow the country to believe that this is a team with a chance. What they sorely lack is composure and clarity of ideas in the final third of the pitch. Up to that point their passing is assured and relatively precise, the movement good and controlled, but as they approach the danger area and a congestion of defenders, they waver and stumble, losing structure and with that the momentum to threaten the goal keeper. This could almost certainly be attributed to the lack of quality striker, be it as target man or as a goal poacher. Without such a presence in front of goal, breaching packed defences becomes tricky and on this particular occasion impossible. This is surely something which will give Santana nightmares.