Cape Town City head coach Eric Tinkler has explained how his side managed to “hurt” Kaizer Chiefs in their 2-0 win on Tuesday evening.
Darwin Gonzalez and Nathan Fasika grabbed goals in each half as City picked up their first DStv Premiership win of the season.
Tinkler was delighted with the result, and said they could’ve even scored more, especially in the first half, and he felt they could’ve come in at half-time with a lead of even three or four goals as their game plan worked perfectly.
“I thought a fantastic performance from us in the first half,” Tinkler said in the post-match press conference.
“And in my humble opinion, I think we should have come in comfortably, three or four [up]. We knew that in the wide spaces, we could hurt them, and we did that extremely well, right from the offset.
“I don’t think they expected us to be playing those balls more direct. We were a little bit more direct today, and I thought there the team responded extremely well, but you can rue your chances sometimes.
“There’s always that fear when you keep missing chances, especially like the ones we had in the first half. So coming in at halftime, 1-0, I said, what we can do now is sit back and try and absorb the pressure, we need to go and look for that second, and possibly the third, we’ve got to take our chances, we’ve got to be better in that final third.
“And they are a team now that like to play in the small spaces, they’re difficult to contain because of the amount of bodies they send forward. So they take a lot of risk in attack. And I thought we exploited that very, very well.
“And even in the second half, even towards the end, we needed to exploit it a little bit better than what we did.”
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Tinkler praised the aggression in his team and pointed out Terrence Mashego’s return after his long injury layoff.
But I thought the team, everybody played at the intensity we needed to play today, played with the aggression that we needed to play against them,” he added.
“Everybody put in a shift. Terrence [Mashego], I was told by the medical staff 45 minutes, and I ended up playing him longer, but constantly talking to him about, ‘Are you okay, can you still go on?’ And then eventually, he just told me, he was done. So everybody put in a shift.
“So I’m extremely happy, we had to contain them, they had two decent chances. But ja, I think, I thought we controlled the match, and should have won this comfortably.”
