SOUTH Africa's most successful football coach, Gordon Igesund, lives according to the dictum that there is no room for comment on the scoreboard.

There are many who are not impressed by this theory and who understand it to justify getting results by any means necessary.

It is a simple enough philosophy. Scoreboards never say who played better. The same applies to the Fifa world rankings. The last six scoreboards have told us that Bafana lost each of those matches.

The rankings also don't lie. If you check them today you will see that the senior national football team is now 73rd in the world, nicely suspended between Uganda and Oman.

While Santana and Igesund tend to be partial to a results-oriented game, there can be no denying that the Brazilian has yet to enjoy any meaningful success. This is a worrying, with about nine months to go before the Fifa World Cup.

In Santana we are stuck with a national coach with a record second to none when it comes to failure. With Igesund the scoreboard reads favourably, though the fans go home unsatisfied. Santana's teams are pretty to look at but offer nothing more satisfactory such as a victory.

Through this all the bigwigs at Safa House can sell us is the tired line that the team is accumulating invaluable experience that will come in handy in June next year.

Maybe.

What we know for sure is that winning or losing are habit forming. And the sooner you kick a bad habit the better.