razilian coach Carlos Alberto Parreira celebrates with his team
Ian Hawkey
THE FIRST time Carlos Alberto Parreira went to Ghana, he fell ill with malaria and then fell for the place. It was 1968, he was 24 and nobody beyond the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro had heard much about him. The Brazilian Football Federation received a request from Ghana to send one of their young coaches to help strengthen the game and manage the national team. Brazil dispatched an intelligent student. Parriera loved it, and his recall of that time seems as sharp as his memories of more recent, more famous, excursions.
After Brazil got him back, Parreira went far: on the staff who served the 1970 world champions, rising to head coach of the next Brazil World Cup winners, in 1994, and recalled to that post for the part of the difficulty comes from South Africa’s wealth. Its Premier Soccer League has become to Africa rather like the Premier League is to Europe: big wages, fancy stadiums, but not too clever over the past 10 years at winning continental trophies. “This league does have good money,” he says, “but they prefer to buy players from abroad. It’s not expensive for them to bring in a player from Zambia. The problem is they don’t bring in the very best African players because they are already in Europe.”
Parreira has dared his employers to back youth at the Nations Cup, and more than half of his squad have less than 10 caps. South Africa’s best player, the Blackburn striker Benni McCarthy, is not in the party, Parreira knowing that even into his early 30s, McCarthy should be a shoo-in for 2010, the coach’s priority date. McCarthy’s club colleague Aaron Mokoena will captain the Nations Cup side, and Parreira has been encouraged by the impression made at Everton by the midfielder Steven Pienaar.
But nobody at the Nations Cup will indulge South Africa for looking long-term. They are billeted in Tamale, the most remote of the venues in Ghana, with Angola, who made their World Cup debuts in Germany; with Senegal, who have a global pedigree from beating France in Seoul at the 2002 World Cup; and with Tunisia, who have turned up at every World Cup since 1998.
We should watch out, Parreira says, for Teko Modise, who plays for the Soweto club, Orlando Pirates: “He is the rising star, with many qualities,” he says. 2006 tournament. His next destination would be Africa, but an Africa unlike the Ghana of the late 1960s. He has to make South Africa a team that looks like it not only belongs at a World Cup, but can be the centrepiece at the jamboree. He has less than 2½ years to turn the 2010 hosts into contenders for a place in at least the last 16 if the party is not to go too flat too early. The South Africans, alias Bafana Bafana, are ranked 78th - well below Haiti - by Fifa.
South Africa pay Parreira about £125,000 a month, a sum raising controversy even before he arrived. The African Cup of Nations will reveal whether the Brazilian has made Bafana any better. They qualified, which was not to be taken for granted for a team who scored no goals in their 270 minutes at the tournament in 2006. Parreira thinks
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article3216747.ece
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