PiE SPORTS DESK
Three days into the job, the new coach’s preliminary selection for Guinea, Eritrea and Egypt tells a story that goes well beyond the team sheet.
Pitso Mosimane was barely three days into his second permanent spell as Bafana Bafana head coach when he named a preliminary squad for three matches that will define the opening weeks of his tenure: a 2027 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier at home to Guinea on September 26, a return qualifier away to Eritrea on September 30, and a high-profile friendly in Cairo against Egypt on October 4 — a fixture with obvious personal resonance given his two-year, trophy-laden spell in charge of Al Ahly. What is striking about the squad is not its size or its structure, but its restraint. Mosimane has largely kept faith with the core group built by his predecessor, Hugo Broos, the same group that helped South Africa reach the knockout rounds of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But scattered among the familiar names are half a dozen inclusions that reward a closer look — recalls, surprises and promotions that, taken together, sketch the outline of how the new coach intends to build his Bafana Bafana.
The Framework: Continuity Before Revolution
There was an obvious temptation for any incoming coach to stamp authority on a World Cup squad by tearing it up. Mosimane resisted it. The spine of the group that took South Africa to the last 16 in North America remains intact — Ronwen Williams in goal, Teboho Mokoena and Relebohile Mofokeng in midfield, Lyle Foster leading the line. That continuity is itself a message: Mosimane is not arriving to reinvent Bafana Bafana from scratch, but to build on it. His new inclusions, then, are not wholesale changes but pointed insertions — each one a small case study in what has caught the coach’s eye in his first days on the job.
Luther Singh: The Forgotten Man Earns His Recall
Of all the names on the list, Luther Singh’s is the one that raised the most eyebrows. The 28-year-old winger has been out of the Bafana picture for an extended stretch, a slow fade from the international radar that had many assuming his national team career was effectively over. But dig into what Singh has actually been doing at club level and the recall reads less like sentiment and more like a coach rewarding form.
Since arriving at Cypriot side AEL Limassol in 2024, Singh has quietly rebuilt himself into one of the most productive South Africans playing abroad. In the 2025/26 season he racked up nine goals and seven assists in 31 appearances across all competitions for Limassol — comfortably his most productive campaign since his Portuguese league days at Paços de Ferreira and Chaves. The form has not gone unnoticed at club level either: Limassol handed him one of three vice-captaincies heading into the new season, a senior, dressing-room-leadership role for a player once written off as a fringe international. For a coach assembling a squad in a hurry, a proven, in-form wide attacker with leadership credentials at his club is exactly the kind of low-risk, high-upside recall that makes sense — even if it surprised almost everyone outside Limassol.
Cassius Mailula: From Broos’s Cautionary Tale to Red-Hot Return
Few Bafana careers have had as public an autopsy as Cassius Mailula’s. It was Hugo Broos, back in 2023, who delivered the withering verdict that has followed the striker ever since — accusing Mailula’s representatives of prioritising a pay-day over his development when he left Mamelodi Sundowns for Toronto FC. “You have a good agent when that agent is looking out for you,” Broos said at the time, arguing that sending a player with barely 15 PSL appearances into a Toronto squad stacked with the likes of Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Bernardeschi was setting him up to fail. Broos’s prediction proved accurate: Mailula made only a handful of first-team appearances in three years in Canada, and spent his final two seasons out on loan, first at Wydad Casablanca in Morocco and then at Belgium’s KV Kortrijk, with mixed results at both.
The redemption arc has moved fast. Toronto and Mailula mutually terminated his contract in July 2026, six months before it was due to expire, making him a free agent linked with both Kaizer Chiefs and a return to Sundowns. It was Sundowns who won the race, confirming his “homecoming” in early August — just weeks before Mosimane’s squad announcement. Back in the yellow shirt that made his name, and with the pressure of an MLS bench lifted, Mailula’s inclusion looks like a coach betting on a talented young striker rediscovering himself in familiar, comfortable surroundings — precisely the environment Broos always argued he should never have left.
Fawaaz Basadien: Reversing a Two-Year Slide
Basadien’s arc is almost a mirror image of Mailula’s, minus the change of country. Under Broos, Basadien was a first-choice left-back and, for a period, even Bafana’s captain — a status built on a stellar 2024/25 season at Stellenbosch FC in which he swept the club’s Players’ Player and Club Player of the Season awards and racked up eight goals and eighteen assists from full-back over three seasons. That form earned him a big move to champions Mamelodi Sundowns in July 2025. But the step up did not translate into game time: Basadien found himself squeezed out of the Sundowns first team, featuring in just a handful of matches across the 2025/26 season, and by extension out of Broos’s Bafana plans altogether — his AFCON hopes effectively over before they began.
What appears to have prompted Mosimane’s reconsideration is a change at club level rather than a change in the player himself. Former Sundowns midfielder Teko Modise recently noted that Basadien is “finally getting his chance” in the Sundowns side from the start of the 2026/27 season — the long-awaited opportunity to convert his undoubted quality into consistent minutes for the champions. A recall on the back of restored playing time, rather than outstanding new form, suggests Mosimane is backing the player Broos once trusted enough to captain, and giving him the platform to prove that trust was not misplaced.
Brooklyn Poggenpoel: The Journeyman Who Kept Working
Poggenpoel is the kind of name that sends fans reaching for a search engine, and understandably so — his route to a Bafana call-up has been a long and unglamorous one. Born in Mitchells Plain and a nephew of former SuperSport United midfielder Shane Poggenpoel, Brooklyn worked his way up through Cape Umoya United, Cape Town All Stars and Chippa United before a move to SuperSport United in 2024 and, most recently, Durban City. A defensive midfielder by trade, his value has never been about eye-catching numbers — in the current PSL season he has yet to register a goal or assist — but about consistency, work-rate and minutes played, an area where he ranks highly among his positional peers.
What likely tipped the scales is team success: Durban City lifted the 2025/26 Nedbank Cup, one of South African football’s most prestigious domestic trophies, with Poggenpoel a regular fixture in the side that won it. For a new coach assembling a squad in a fortnight, a reliable holding midfielder who has just won silverware and rarely misses a match is a sensible, low-drama pick — the kind of player selected on the strength of what he does for ninety minutes rather than what he does in the headlines.
Ronaldo van Neel: Top-Flight Newcomer with a Golden Boot
Van Neel’s inclusion is arguably the most eyebrow-raising of the lot, given that he has barely played a game of top-flight football. Until this season, the Kuruman-born forward — nicknamed “Crouch” — plied his trade for Hungry Lions in the Motsepe Foundation Championship, South Africa’s second tier. He ended last season by sharing the division’s Top Goal Scorer award, a return that persuaded Golden Arrows to sign him and hand him his Betway Premiership debut at the start of August 2026.
It is an unusually bold call to fast-track a second-tier top scorer straight into a preliminary national squad within weeks of his top-flight bow, but it fits a pattern already visible elsewhere in this list: Mosimane appears willing to reward proven end product, wherever it was produced, rather than defaulting only to established Premiership names. Whether Van Neel makes the final matchday squad or is simply being introduced to the environment early is the more interesting question his selection raises.
The Familiar Faces — With Their Own Backstories
Cemran Dansin, Yanela Mbuthuma and Shandre Campbell are less of a surprise, but each arrives with a story that explains the timing of their inclusion rather than the fact of it.
- Yanela Mbuthuma — the Orlando Pirates forward’s recall follows a productive run of form in the early weeks of the season: a brace against Kruger United ended a personal goal drought, and he followed it with two assists in Pirates’ 3-0 MTN8 win over Sekhukhune United. It is form, not reputation, doing the talking.
- Cemran Dansin — a young Pirates attacking option who has been steadily earning minutes off the bench in the current campaign, including a start against Mamelodi Sundowns in November, part of a broader trend of Mosimane blooding uncapped or lightly-capped domestic talent alongside the World Cup core.
- Shandre Campbell — the Club Brugge winger represents Bafana’s growing European contingent. Still only 20, Campbell has worked his way from Brugge’s NXT reserve side into the first-team picture, and has already collected a Belgian Cup and Belgian Super Cup winner’s medal along the way — continental pedigree that few South Africans his age can match.
Three More Worth Watching: Seema, Dithejane and a Returning Maboe
Beyond the headline surprises, three further inclusions round out the picture of a coach casting a wide net across form, potential and unfinished business.
Lebone Seema — the defender Broos never called
Few snubs in recent Bafana history have been as consistently flagged by pundits as the one suffered by Lebone Seema. The Orlando Pirates centre-back arrived from TS Galaxy in July 2025 and immediately looked the part, forming a formidable central partnership with Mbekezeli Mbokazi that helped anchor the Buccaneers’ defence — yet Hugo Broos never gave him a single cap, preferring the likes of Mbokazi, Nkosinathi Sibisi, Tylon Smith and Khulumani Ndamane. Even after Mbokazi’s January move to Chicago Fire left a gap alongside him, Seema kept performing, a run capped by a Man-of-the-Match display in a 3-0 win over Chippa United that had former Pirates captain Lucky Lekgwathi and TV analyst Junior Khanye both publicly labelling him a future Bafana captain. Uncapped at 24 and overlooked for two and a half years, Seema’s inclusion looks overdue rather than surprising — the clearest case in this squad of Mosimane simply rewarding what everybody in the league had already been saying.
Puso Dithejane — the bench player who turned red-hot
Dithejane’s story mirrors Mailula’s in shape, if not yet in outcome. Signed by Chicago Fire from TS Galaxy in January 2026 on a lucrative U22 Initiative deal, he spent the first half of the season as a fringe figure, deputising for regulars Jonathan Bamba and Philip Zinckernagel and mostly featuring for the club’s MLS Next Pro side. Everything changed after the World Cup break: Dithejane scored and assisted in a 3-2 defeat to Inter Miami, then bagged a stoppage-time brace to help Chicago beat Liga MX champions Cruz Azul and advance in the Leagues Cup — form good enough that head coach Gregg Berhalter publicly praised his “ton of potential” and conceded he is now “on the brink of the starting XI.” For a player who turned down a return to Kaizer Chiefs to gamble on North America, the timing of his breakout — just weeks before Mosimane named his squad — makes his call-up close to self-explanatory.
Lebogang Maboe — an old face given a new door
Unlike the others, Maboe is not exactly a stranger to the Bafana set-up — he was a regular international between 2017 and 2021, with his last appearance coming, ironically, in Hugo Broos’s very first match in charge. What followed was a long international exile: four years out of the picture while he moved between Mamelodi Sundowns, a loan at SuperSport United and, this season, Kaizer Chiefs. He was included in Broos’s preliminary World Cup squad but did not survive the final cut to 26. His recall under Mosimane follows a symbolic moment at club level — his first goal for Chiefs, a penalty against Richards Bay that ended a personal scoring drought stretching back to May 2021 — and a public endorsement of the new coach, under whom Maboe won four straight league titles during their time together at Sundowns. It is a reunion of sorts, and Chiefs’ otherwise thin representation in this squad — Maboe is their only representative, with World Cup man Bradley Cross out injured — makes his inclusion carry extra weight for the Naturena faithful.
The Notable Absentees: A Partnership Sidelined Together
If the inclusions tell a story of opportunity, the squad’s most significant omissions tell one of misfortune — and, ironically, both centre on the same defensive partnership that started every minute of South Africa’s run to the World Cup last-16. Mbekezeli Mbokazi, the Chicago Fire centre-back whose emergence as an MLS All-Star vote-topper made him one of the form stories of Bafana’s tournament, suffered a serious thigh tear in training shortly after returning from the World Cup. Initially expected to be a matter of weeks, the injury proved worse than first feared, and Chicago Fire head coach Gregg Berhalter confirmed in early August that the 20-year-old is out for the remainder of the 2026 season — ruling him out of Mosimane’s opening qualifiers entirely.
His regular defensive partner, Hannover 96’s Ime Okon, is missing too. The towering, German-based centre-back — who chose Bafana Bafana over a possible Nigeria career and started alongside Mbokazi throughout the World Cup group stage — has been a recurring fitness concern over the past year, having already lost long stretches to a hamstring problem and a bout of illness during the current cycle. With both first-choice centre-backs unavailable, the pairing that Okon himself credited for growing “more and more” understanding of each other through the World Cup will have to wait to resume — and it hands an early opportunity to whichever central defensive duo, be it Sibisi, Ndamane, Makhanya or Seema himself, that Mosimane trusts to fill the void against Guinea and Eritrea.
The Egypt Subplot
The friendly bookending this window — away to Egypt in Cairo on October 4 — carries a subtext of its own. Mosimane spent two years in charge of Al Ahly, winning back-to-back CAF Champions League titles, and SAFA president Danny Jordaan has been open in suggesting the coach’s history in the Egyptian capital will add an extra layer of intrigue to the fixture. It is a fitting final test for a coach whose first squad selection has, on close inspection, been less about sweeping change than about carefully identifying which players — forgotten, faded or fast-tracked — have done enough in recent months to earn Pitso Mosimane’s trust.
Fixtures: South Africa vs Guinea (AFCON 2027 qualifier, home) — Saturday, September 26, 2026 · Eritrea vs South Africa (AFCON 2027 qualifier, away) — Wednesday, September 30, 2026 · Egypt vs South Africa (international friendly, Cairo International Stadium) — Sunday, October 4, 2026.
