Bafana Bafana coach Hugo Broos was adamant he will no longer entertain questions about Themba Zwane and Andile Jali.
The Mamelodi Sundowns duo, 32 and 31 years of age, have not been part of Broos’ Bafana squads and are seemingly not part of the coaches’ plans for the national team.
The Belgian tactician has now insisted he will not answer questions about the duo after journalists again asked about Zane and Jali’s omission from his latest squad.
“For once and for all, I’m very sorry… Since I’m here everybody is always talking about Jali and Zwane,” he said on Monday.
“I don’t have a comment on that. You know why they are not here, so I don’t have a comment on that, I will not repeat that every time.
“I’m very sorry, but for me no comment anymore about Jali and about Zwane.”
Broos also stated that he would like to have a set core of players by the time the AFCON qualifiers start in June.
“You always have to try to increase the quality and to improve your team,” he added.
“We started during September. I said from the beginning I’ll try to build a young team but the door is not shut for the older ones.
“Look here on my left side [pointing at Thabang Monare], he’s the oldest players, he’s 32. So I never said the door is shut for those players.
“But when I came here I saw that the team was old and when you have an old team you don’t have a future.
“When we made the evaluation of the World Cup qualifiers, we saw that we missed something, we missed experience.
“I saw the performances of Sundowns, AmaZulu and Pirates in Confederations Cup and Champions League and when players perform at that level, I don’t think that you can keep them out of your team – they deserve to be there, they have the quality, they have the experience.
“Therefor I hope that those guys will improve the quality and we’ll have a better team that two months ago.”
“This process will go on but the goal of all this is to have 25 players and that 25 players will always be there.
“I hope that for qualifiers for AFCON, I’ll have my team. After seven to eight months, doing scouting every week in the PSL and looking for players abroad, I hope now we’ll have a group of players who’ll start the qualifiers in June.”
