Mokwena Gives Update On More Downs Signings

Mamelodi Sundowns co-head coach Rulani Mokwena has given an update about the DStv Premiership champions’ pre-season and their work in the transfer market ahead of the new season.

Sundowns, who won all domestic silverware last season, returned to pre-season training at the start of the month.

So far, Downs have only officially announced the signing of Sipho Mbule but there are other names still linked with the club, such as Ronwen Williams and Moroccan defender Abdelmounaim Boutouil, while Chilean midfielder Marcelo Allende has also been linked with the club.

Mokwena now confirmed to SABC Sport that the club are still working on some “complicated” deals.

“We had specific positions, for sure, and we’ll make the necessary announcements as we come close,” he said.

“You know that we lost a very good player in Ricardo Nascimento, that already was a position that we were were looking at and two or three more positions.

“We’re in that space where we working very hard and just like the Sipho Mbule recruit, a lot of credit needs to go to the senior management of the club – Jogesh, Bra Stan and even our sporting director Flemming, for working very hard behind the scenes because it was a complicated deal.

“The support that we got from the leadership of the club, the chairman, the president, helped us. So two or three more deals, complicated deals, but ones we’ll get over the line before the season starts.”

After spending a week at Chloorkop, the Sundowns team headed to Royal Marang in Rustenburg for the next phase of their pre-season training. Mokwena added that after the early work done on player conditioning, they have now shifted their focus to the tactical side.

“The first week of our Pre-season [included] intense testing,” Mokwena said on the club’s official website.

“The work that is done by not just our medical department but also from the conditioning department in assessing the players’ physiology and the physical readiness of the players to take part in full team training, we were very satisfied with that and the information that we received was very good.

“The camp in Marang gives us a lot of possibilities, we are not people that train in isolation or train different elements or factors that contribute to the performance.

“From day one already we were working with the physical aspects, but already introducing a new tactical and technical concept that we’d like to work on and to improve.

“These were ideas that we had already from last season, there were things that we felt we had the condition to be better at, but maybe we didn’t have the possibility.

“Now that we have a bit of time to train and to prepare the team, we focus a lot more on the tactical aspects and try to make sure that we prepare the team in that regard because during the season we don’t have the time to prepare and train.”

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