Cape Town - Bafana Bafana coach Gordon Igesund believes his young players will learn from their 2-1 loss to Zimbabwe in Soweto.
The coach selected a young side to take on their local rivals at Orlando Stadium on Tuesday night and it proved to be a real baptism of fire.
Following the disappointment from the weekend, where South Africa failed to advance any further in their bid to qualify for next year's World Cup in Brazil, Knowledge Musona managed to pile more misery on the national team with a splendid second half strike, before Cuthbert Malajila put the game beyond doubt in the last minute of additional time, despite a superb Bernard Parker goal seconds later.
But Igesund believes that sometimes it can be good for a young player's development to lose a game.
In an interview with the Soccer Laduma website, he admitted they lost to a better team on the night.
"You can see this was a team that hasn't played for two and a half months - they came from the COSAFA Cup. But that's no excuse, sometimes it's very good to lose games, because when you are trying out and you want to use players as development, and get them going, you want to see whether they can jump up to that level or not."
The coach selected a young side to take on their local rivals at Orlando Stadium on Tuesday night and it proved to be a real baptism of fire.
Following the disappointment from the weekend, where South Africa failed to advance any further in their bid to qualify for next year's World Cup in Brazil, Knowledge Musona managed to pile more misery on the national team with a splendid second half strike, before Cuthbert Malajila put the game beyond doubt in the last minute of additional time, despite a superb Bernard Parker goal seconds later.
But Igesund believes that sometimes it can be good for a young player's development to lose a game.
In an interview with the Soccer Laduma website, he admitted they lost to a better team on the night.
"You can see this was a team that hasn't played for two and a half months - they came from the COSAFA Cup. But that's no excuse, sometimes it's very good to lose games, because when you are trying out and you want to use players as development, and get them going, you want to see whether they can jump up to that level or not."