SO why should we reasonably have believed that the national soccer team would beat Norway?
Theirs is a better team than ours, they're ranked higher (43rd compared to 73rd), and they were playing at home in Oslo. It would have been a turn up had Norway lost, even though they're not exactly a hot property.
Still, they have played in three previous World Cups and can boast of never having lost to Brazil. Yet all South Africa's hopes were pinned on winning this match, and now the nation is in uproar.
"Most South Africans," declared the Sunday Times, "believe we are in a state of football emergency."
How long did it take them to figure that? This emergency has been going on for years; when our team couldn't even qualify for the African Nations Cup, you might have glimpsed the writing on the wall. If you enjoy doom and gloom, you could have gone back even further than that to find evidence of serious trouble.
Suddenly, however, with the World Cup drawing ever closer, the nation is being invited to join in the panic. Let's face it, if you're going to declare an emergency, or worse a crisis, don't do it in half measures. Invite the nation in. Shout it from the rooftops or, in this case, from every media portal, that Oslo in October marks the spot when SA football finally lost its way.
Why is this so? Depending which side of the fence you sit, you can either blame the media or the SA Football Association. With the election of new office bearers to the latter came the news that Bafana Bafana and its head coach in particular were under intense official scrutiny.
The media had had the coach in their gun sights for some time now, but with a little encouragement from the new Safa hierarchy, they announced that Joel Santana was effectively a dead man. Everything, it was suggested, depended on the outcome of the two friendly games against Norway and Iceland.
Perhaps they figured that this would inspire Santana and his boys to, as they say, catch a wake up. Well, they haven't, have they?
I'm sure they're relying on Iceland, ranked 93 in the world, no World Cup appearances, and somewhat frigid in a football sense. If our team beats them in Reyjavik tomorrow night, will they call off the crisis?