Former South Africa defender Macbath Sibaya has revealed that his country could’ve performed better than they did at the 2010 World Cup had tournament been hosted on a different continent.
He believes that the players could not distant themselves from the fact that they were the host country which really affected the focus of the team.
He feels that being the host nation, the expectation to perform was quite high which perhaps affected their overall performance.
“It’s difficult to sum everything up. One was caught between being a citizen of a hosting nation and a player,” Sibaya told IOL.
“There were also ambitions that needed to be reached by the team, and there were a whole lot of activities that were surrounding the World Cup, so it was quite difficult to deal with everything and being everything at once.”
“It could have been easy if the tournament was played on another continent. Maybe if as a country we were used to qualifying for major tournaments, that would have also made our job a little bit easier,” Sibaya added.
“There was a very big gap between Germany and Korea/Japan. There was an eight-year gap between Korea/Japan and 2010.
“A huge gap. We didn’t participate in big competitions, and as a country, we struggled in the [Africa] Nations Cup and so forth.”
