South Africa coach Ephraim ‘Shakes’ Mashaba, has revealed his frustration at exiting the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations tournament.
The Bafana Bafana scored first in their group matches, but failed to win every time. Their opening match ended in a 3-1 defeat to Algeria, before they drew 1-1 with Senegal. Ghana beat them in the last game 2-1 to send them packing.
Mashaba says he is not happy with his team’s failure to finish off opponents.
“I think we gave it away again, for us to come out, score a goal and we couldn’t consolidate,” Mashaba said in his post match interview after the Ghana defeat.
“In the first half after we scored, we took the game to them, that’s why they couldn’t come. The biggest fall came out in the first 10 minutes of the second half, everybody went to sit back, all nine players sitting, we tried to push them up, we made changes, it didn’t work out.”
Mashaba was however keen to point out the valuable lessons learnt by his team at the competition holding in Equatorial Guinea.
“I think it was a good learning lesson for the boys. We went through the qualifiers, they did very well,” he added.
“We played against some of the best teams on the continent, we played Algeria as well in this tournament.
“We stood for ourselves, the score there was not a true reflection of the game. The Senegal game as well, we created more chances than what they did.
“Against Ghana it was a game of two halves. First half we played very well and got a goal, but in the second half we sat at the back and we invited pressure for ourselves.
“I think we need to go back to our basics of playing football, knowing when to do things, how to do things, and where to do them.
“You need that ability to kill a game, that is one of the things I am talking about when we I talk about the basics.
“Why rush when you’re one goal up, buy time, at that time you could have seen they were on a high, what we should have done was to kill the game, but we were knocking it back to them and they came at us and that’s where the problem was.”
Comments