Bafana Bafana’s 2-1 win over Morocco has convinced coach Hugo Broos that his team has tremendously improved.
South Africa edged the continent’s number-one-ranked team in a 2023 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier at FNB Stadium on Saturday.
Having struggled against stronger opponents under Broos before, Bafana stunned the North Africans who are also the 2022 Fifa World Cup semi-finalists.
“Like I said before the game, the result is not important, but I like to see a good performance, I like to see progression we made in the last months,” Broos told the media.
“I think and I hope that you’ll agree we saw a team that made enormous progress in the last months.
“We played against a very good team, a very good team! We were never dominated, never. On the contrary, we sometimes dominated that team.
“We had three or four very good chances to score. If I remember, maybe one or two for Morocco.”
The lowest point of Broos’ tenure is when Bafana were thumped 5-0 by France in March 2022, a result that invited sharp criticism of the Belgian and his men.
But the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations-winning coach feels that defeat and others were eye-openers.
“I’m happy that I went on to give confidence to that group of players,” said Broos.
“I believe in them, even when some people didn’t believe in them, because I made bad choices, I didn’t understand the South African culture…
“But you see, you don’t build a team in one day. You need time. In that time defeat can be very useful. So we had defeats but we learnt a lot from them.”
Bafana will now wait to test themselves during the September Fifa break with an international friendly match against a team yet to be announced.