Bafana farce: comedy or tragedy?

"Shakespeare once asked what's in a name," the chairman of South Africa's 2010 Soccer World Cup bid, Irvin Khoza, reckons.

The Bard would have had a field day writing the play The Bafana Squad That Never Was as the saga involving the South African team to play England on Thursday assumed farcical proportions on Sunday.

The upshot of yet another bizarre day in South African football sees Jomo Sono usurp Shakes Mashaba as coach of the national team for one game.

There were also wholesale changes made to the locally based squad Mashaba so emotionally unveiled on Thursday, with European-based players such as Lucas Radebe, Quinton Fortune, Benni McCarthy and Shaun Bartlett included after they were left out by Mashaba last week.

He may have been shifted aside, but Mashaba still keeps his job as national coach. He refused to discuss the matter with the media.

The SA 2010 Bid Committee, however, has taken control of the England game, putting its own technical team in place with Sono as coach, assisted by Khabo Zondo and Doctor Khumalo, with Augusto Palacios as manager.

As for Khoza's Shakespearean musings, there was indeed quite a debate about the name of the South African team.

It started with South African Football Association president Molefi Oliphant saying the bid committee had requested Safa's permission to host three international events as "special events".

The game against England, to be the international launch of South Africa's bid for the 2010 World Cup, is one of those events.

It was therefore the bid's responsibility to assemble a team for the game, said Oliphant, but they asked Safa to do it for them.

Oliphant, however, announced that because of "unfortunate developments" over the past few days, it was "difficult, if not impossible" for Safa to get a team together.

Safa then passed on the responsibility of assembling the team back to the bid committee - and then chucked in the spanner, saying they needed an appropriate name to refer to the team.

At a press conference on Sunday, Khoza said the team would be known as the South African XI, and not Bafana Bafana.

This, though, put the game's official international status in jeopardy.

Realising the folly of essentially making the England game a glorified exhibition match, the bid committee later announced that the team would indeed be an official one and would be called Bafana Bafana after all.

Bid committee chief executive Danny Jordaan said the committee was hoping to use the England game to target Europe, where there are eight Fifa executive members.

With the game set to be widely televised in Europe and Asia, the bid committee felt a locally-based squad was not so lekker and brought in Bafana's internationally recognised European-based players.

As for Mashaba, he joked that he was looking for complimentary tickets for the Durban game.

The whole sorry episode, however, is no joke and hasn't exactly covered South African football in glory at a time when it can least afford egg on its face.