Mashaba: Bafana must learn to kill off games

South African national team coach Shakes Mashaba was left frustrated at his team's inability to finish off opponents at the 2015 African Cup of Nations.

Bafana crashed out of the competition at the first round stage after losing 2-1 to Ghana on Tuesday night.

For the third game in a row, South Africa started brightly and scored the first goal. But as in their previous matches against Algeria and Senegal, they were unable to finish off the job, leaving Mashaba a frustrated man on the sidelines.

“I think we gave it away again, for us to come out, score a goal and we couldn't consolidate,” Mashaba said after the match against the Black Stars, who qualified for the knockout phase together with Algeria.

“In the first half after we scored, we took the game to them, that's why they couldn't come, the biggest fall came out in the first 10 minutes of the second half, everybody went to sit back, all nine players sitting, we tried to push them up, we made changes, it didn't work out,” Mashaba continued.

“I think we need to go back to our basics of playing football, knowing when to do things, how to do things, and where to do them. You need that ability to kill a game, that is one of the things I am talking about when we I talk about the basics.

“Why rush when you're one goal up, buy time…at that time you could have seen they were on a high, what we should have done was to kill the game, but we were knocking it back to them and they came at us and that's where the problem was.”