Forca
Portugal -
A very good site about the Portuguese national team.
England
Fanzine -
Everything you want to know about England's national team past and
present.
Senior National Men's
Team
Nickname: Bafana
Bafana
International Debut: vs
Cameroon (7 July, 1992 in Durban)
Highlights:
1996 CAF African Cup of Nations
champions.
Awarded the FIFA/Coca-Cola Best Mover of
the Year Award in 1996.
Became the first Southern African nation in
1997 to qualify for the FIFA World Cup Finals.
Compete in the FIFA Confederations
Cup
Runners-up, 1998 African Cup of
Nations.
World Cup debut in France in 1998.
Winners Afro-Asian Trophy in 1999.
Third place in the 1999 African Cup of
Nations.
Compete in 2002 Fifa World Cup Finals,
Korea/Japan.
Reunification Cup winners in 2002.
Advance to quarter-finals of the 2005
Concacaf Gold Cup.
Team
History:
THE FIRST
GAME
Their
earliest documented football match in
South
Africa was held in
Cape
Town, although Pietermaritzburg
also claims to be the cradle of the game in the country. Football was
brought to
South Africa
in the same way it was spread elsewhere in the world,
through the British military and through travelers from
the colonial power.
The ‘Cape
Argus’ newspaper advertised the first match, played on
August 23, 1862, between soldiers of the British
garrison and employees of the colonial administration,
including a youthful John X Merriman, who later went on
to become prime minister of the Cape Colony.
It was
played at Green Point, which ironically is now offering
up a new stadium to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup
finals.
Doctor scored in the
first game
Market Square in
Pietermaritzburg staged matches between civilians and military
personnel soon after, although historians suggests these were
more mass ‘free-for-alls’, and Port Elizabeth followed soon
after. The oldest surviving football photograph in
South
Africa is of a group of
players from Port Elizabeth Colonial Board Football Club,
taken in 1869 and resplendent in white shirts and white longs
and black bowler hats.
It is worth noting
that the first game of football had already been played in
South Africa before the sport of ‘association football’ was
even formally constituted, making South Africa one of the
forerunners of the modern game. The origin of the
football can be traced to a series of five meetings between 26
October and 8 December 1863. The first of these, at a tavern
in
London, was where the
Football Association was formed and an initial set of laws for
the game drawn up. The last of the meetings completed a split
with the code of rugby and established ‘association football’
as a separate sport. to go on to become the world’s most
popular game.
Football spread
widely in
South Africa with
the influx of Britons to fight in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879
and the first Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1881. The sport very
quickly became known to all of the country’s races, although
in its infancy was still the preserve of whites with blacks
growingly interested observers.
