South Africa (SA) face a crucial FIFA World Cup group-stage clash against Czechia this Thursday night after suffering a two-nil defeat to Mexico.<\/p>\n
A win or a draw could keep SA\u2019s hopes of progressing to the next round.<\/p>\n
However, criticism has been directed at both the players and coaching staff following the disappointing start to the campaign.<\/p>\n
Soccer fans in Kimberly, Northern Cape province, say the team must fight hard in Thursday\u2019s game to stay in the tournament. \u201cIt\u2019s a must-win game for us, so we just need to go toe-to-toe with Czechia. And if we lose, we can see where we can improve as a team,\u201d says one of the SA supporters.<\/p>\n
Another fan says, \u201cWe really need the win for today so that we can qualify for the other round. We really need the win, and the coach needs to make big changes for us to progress in the World Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n
–SABC–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":36892,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-37452","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"A win or a draw could keep SA\u2019s hopes of progressing to the next round.","published_date":"","news_description":"A win or a draw could keep SA\u2019s hopes of progressing to the next round.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/37452","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\/37452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37453,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/37452\/revisions\/37453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=37452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}