I spoke with South African former professional footballer Matthew Booth and asked him what goes into a player's decision when choosing which country to represent.

It's down to each individual, I should imagine factors for and against.

I'll give you one example.

Perhaps a player is not particularly close to their father.

Their father comes from a particular nation, and they decide to choose their mother's nation instead.

You know, it can be as something as simple as that.

I do feel, though, that patriotism is less and less of a factor, and players nowadays are choosing nations to play for from a point of exposure, from a point of view of what that nation can do for them from an exposure and monetary basis, the next contract, et cetera.

And how important has the African diaspora become to the success of national teams?

[laughs]

I'll take that.

I'll take that.

Yeah.

The new batch of youngsters also making their mark.

Young and hungry.

Um, and we've seen a, a handful of those as well.

Uh, so it's very refreshing.

It's probably all of those things with different contributions coming from each element.

It's a bit confusing for me because the core of this team is made up of the Orlando Pirates and Sundown's teams who have played some massive games this past season, John.

So we were ready for the big match temperament, I felt.

But leading up to that Mexico game, we were delayed by visas by a day or two.

And when it comes to planning leading up to a game of that nature, it's very specific.

So if you're delayed by a couple of days, that just compacts all of that and I don't think they got it right leading up to that Mexico game.

We looked really sluggish off form.

Yeah.

What made you s- decide after all these decades to actually start publishing? What, what did it for you?

Well, I'd had a radio series, a, a couple of radio series on A- in, on American radio back in the early 2000s, so I was sort of already paid, done paid work, as it were.

I had a full-time job, still got a full-time job, and I used to have to travel for that job, so I was really only able to write at weekends.

And as any writer knows, you can't get the momentum going if you're just writing a week at a time.

So what happened was lockdown.

That's really what happened.

So suddenly I w- I couldn't leave the house, and I was not traveling to work anymore.

Which is-