Williams Admits Defensive Concerns After Bafana Bafana’s AFCON Exit
Bafana Bafana goalkeeper Ronwen Williams has raised concerns about conceding a lot of goals in the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations.
Williams is currently facing online criticism about conceding six goals in four games for South Africa. While some say it’s the defence problem, others point to the goalkeeper’s performance that has dropped.
Williams is being criticised despite having had a fantastic campaign in the 2023 AFCON edition, where he kept five clean sheets and delivered strong performances.
Bafana’s journey in the AFCON was cut short following their 2-1 defeat to Cameroon in the round of 16 on Sunday.
“We’ve been known to be very solid as a team,” Williams said on SABC Sport.
“We’ve kept a lot of clean sheets over the last few years. I mean, at the previous AFCON, we broke the record, and now you see the amount of goals we’ve conceded in this tournament; obviously, it’s a concern. There are things we have to work on; obviously, we know as a team what’s been going on. A lot of things to work on and lessons to take.”
Mamelodi Sundowns shotstopper further added that they did not have proper preparations due to a few players arriving late at the camp.
“Things were different. It’s a different tournament and a different country. The way it started as well was that players came late into camp for various reasons because of being with their team. You can’t prepare 100 percent, but it’s like that for all the teams,” Williams stated.
“It wasn’t a good start to the preparations when players are not there, when you have half the team there. It’s not nice, but as I said, it was like that for every team, but I think there are a lot of lessons to take, and we as a team have to sit down and have a discussion so that we don’t make the same mistakes.
“We’ve come a long way as a team, we’ve done extremely well, but this was a test. This was a real test, and honestly speaking, we know we should be better, we know we can do better, we’ve proved over the last few years, but we go back to the drawing board, and we go again.”
