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2010: 3-month camp for Bafana
17/04/2008 14:45 - (SA)
Johannesburg - South Africa's domestic football season is to end early in 2010 to give national coach Carlos Alberto Parreira three months to whip the struggling World Cup hosts into shape at a training camp.
The Premier Soccer League (PSL), which normally wraps up at the end of May, is now being brought forward to end in March, giving Parreira extra time to prepare his charges for the opening match of the tournament on June 11.
"We are doing this because we want to assist the national team in the best way we can. The World Cup year is a big football year," PSL chief operating officer Ronnie Schloss told the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times newspaper.
The paper said that Parreira, who coached his native Brazil to victory at the 1994 World Cup, had asked to have his players released from their clubs seven months before the tournament but that was rejected at a meeting of PSL chairpersons at a meeting in Johannesburg last week.
Parreira, hired on a monthly salary of R1.8m, has been under fire over the team's first-round exit at the African Nations Cup in January, with the team ranked only 71 in the world.
Some of the pressure however was eased last week after Bafana Bafana (Zulu for "boys") beat Paraguay 3-0 in a friendly near Pretoria, widely seen as their most impressive performance since the Brazilian took charge last year.
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