After a whirlwind of a week, AmaZulu Head Coach Benni McCarthy has finally broken his silence on rumours linking him with the Bafana Bafana job.
McCarthy was considered a strong candidate to take over from Molefi Ntseki, but that chapter was brought to a close when Belgian tactician Hugo Broos was unveiled by SAFA on Wednesday.
McCarthy was speaking at an AmaZulu press conference on Thursday where he, Usuthu President Sandile Zungu and Director Manzini Zungu addressed the media.
Having taken the club to second on the log, McCarthy says that when there is success, there will be links to other jobs, but he and his team, who are on a 16 match unbeaten run, are fully focused on what they are achieving at AmaZulu.
“Like I said, we’re grown-ups, and we’re contracted to the club, and rumours will always be rumours,” McCarthy told the media at the press conference.
“When you do well, and you have success, you’re always going to be rumoured to everything that’s not where you are.
“I think we don’t really pay mind to the rumours but rather keep our focus on what we doing and what we started and the journey we started as a team, the President, myself the technical team and the players, to get into the top four in the league.
“As I said, from the beginning, as a coach, you always have your own ambitions as well, the president stated very clear that he wanted AmaZulu to be a top four team. And our conversations was we’ll come in and we’ll do our best to get there, but for me, I have bigger visions.”
“And I think from what I’ve seen that team was far more more capable of just settling for top four and we could do more with what we had. So that was my ambition, and the coaching staff. And obviously, we ended up making the players’ ambition as well, but you know the quality that we have, we can compete against anyone, we don’t have to fear anymore.”
“So we will take it game by game and we will work towards that. So everything else we block out and when we are at training or when we on the pitch, we just focus on us and us only, we don’t care what goes on in the media, what goes on in other clubs, our focus is solely on the individuals bettering ourselves and bettering as a team as well.”
“And you can see in the matches that we played, that it was always about AmaZulu, we didn’t care about the opposition that we played again. We prepare well for them, but when we step on to the pitch, it’s what we do. And that’s what we’ve done, so the rumours, ja it gets a lot, a bit much, but we try not let it get to us and derail us from what we want to do as individuals and as a team.”
