While Mamelodi Sundowns scored more goals in the second leg of their CAF Champions League qualifier than in the first against Seychelles’ Le Passe, Manqoba Mngqithi said he was more impressed with his teams’ first leg performance.
Sundowns won 8-1 on Friday, to win the tie 15-1 and advance to the Group Stages.
But Mngqithi said that while his team scored more in the second leg, he was actually more impressed with how his team performed last week when they won 7-0.
“To be honest, I was more impressed with the first leg,” Mngqithi said at the post-match presser.
“Because we played with a lot of intensity from the beginning. But the second leg first half was not one of my best, I was not very excited, we play a very monotonous game of trying to play the point behind the defence, even when those situations were not available.
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“And thus we lost a lot of balls and found ourselves having to deal with transitions, and we even conceded a very stupid goal from transition. But the second half improved in leaps and bounds. And again we started to show the right mentality. forced, them to make a lot of mistakes, kept the structure the right way, because, first half, I also felt that the structure was not proper, we were too anxious to try and find the space behind the defence, which would make us to have a lot of holes, immediately we lose possession, the opponents have got a chance.
“I must say our counter-pressing was also not very good first half, even our high press probably only yielded something when we force them to play long balls, and then we want those long balls from Mothobi and Mosa. But generally, we were not in top shape first half.
“But I think the second half was the performance that one would have loved to see from the beginning of the match. It’s not like we, we did not want to play first half, but I just think we were over-anxious to replicate or to improve on the score of the previous match. Because we created a lot of chances, but we were too anxious. And that made us to commit some silly mistakes where maybe when you should have gone one more time before you put a cutback or a cross, immediately the ball is played into the box. And I think we gave the goalkeeper, a lot of moments that he did not deserve.
“But otherwise, one is excited that we managed to come back strong in the second half and kept the structure very well played, that extra pass improved our number of passes, improved our position, improved our box entries, improved our shots at goals, a lot of stats improved in all our metrics second half and that was very positive.”
