South Africa’s (SA) Bafana Bafana have arrived in Mexico City for their opening game of the 2026 FIFA World Cup against co-hosts Mexico this Thursday.<\/p>\n
The team was welcomed by scores of local and travelling SA fans at the team\u2019s hotel last night.<\/p>\n
Bafana spent a week at their base camp in Pachuca with Sport Minister Gayton McKenzie, before moving to Mexico City.<\/p>\n
McKenzie says the SA team should not be underestimated.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people should stop underestimating our team. This is a team that qualified despite having three points deducted. Some teams like Nigeria did not qualify but no points were deducted. These boys, Bafana Bafana are going to show the world that when the going gets tough we get tougher is South Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI got no doubt that we are going to draw with Mexico and the other two, we are going to beat South Korea [and Czech Republic]. I\u2019m saying this team is going to go far,\u201d adds McKenzie.<\/p>\n
–SABC–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14530,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-36686","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The team was welcomed by scores of local and travelling SA fans at the team\u2019s hotel last night.","published_date":"","news_description":"The team was welcomed by scores of local and travelling SA fans at the team\u2019s hotel last night.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/36686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/36686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36687,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/36686\/revisions\/36687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=36686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}