Former SA U-23 defender Matthew Booth has come to the defence of the team following their disappointing show at the Tokyo Olympics.

David Notoane’s team were eliminated in the group stages after losing all three matches to Japan, France and Mexico to finish bottom of their pool with no point.

This means in three Olympics tournaments, SA have failed to progress beyond the group stage and Booth, who was part of the team that represented the country in Sydney in 2000, shared his views on why the national team is failing to progress to the knockout phase.

“I think there are certain excuses that we can make. You know, in 2000 we probably had the best preparations and looking at our team out of all three squads, we should be the ones who should have gone through to the knockout,” Booth told Sowetan.

“It is just that we didn’t take our chances against Japan and Slovakia. Everybody still talks about Brazil [the only game they won], but that didn’t help us in the end.

“But we had the best preparations for six years together. The core of the team stayed the same and that’s exactly what you want from a junior national team. The last two squads haven’t had that.”

Booth said the fact that the recent team didn’t have proper preparations due to the Covid-19 pandemic also contributed to their failure.

Before Tokyo, they didn’t play enough friendlies compared to their opponents whose players have been together while preparing for the games.

“In their defence, they didn’t have that sort of preparation, especially this one. Notoane’s team, if you include Covid, the lack of friendlies and the fact that Kaizer Chiefs went to the finals [CAF Champions League] and two important players [Nkosingiphile Ngcobo and Reeve Frosler] were not sure if they will join the team,” he said.

“There are few players who were sent back for medical reasons and if you take those factors into consideration, coming up against good teams like Japan, France and Mexico, you will understand why they didn’t progress.”

Booth also feels the only way the team will have a good tournament and progress to the next round in future, is when there is consistency from all junior levels and players are kept together. 

“They have now got the Olympics under their belt from that experience... when they progress to the senior national team, they hit the ground running.”