Moroka Swallows head coach Steve Komphela has discussed Andile Jali’s early red card against his former club in the MTN8 quarter-final.
Jali, 33, only left Sundowns at the end of last campaign and faced his former coach and teammates, but his reunion only lasted eight minutes before he received a red card for a reckless challenge.
Even though, Swallows lost 1-0, Komphela didn’t want to go much into detail in blaming his captain, saying he cannot drown himself over something he cannot change.
“There is two things in life: area of concern, area of change,” he said after the match.
“If you can change something change it, but if you can’t change it, it’s just a concern, you move on.
“And these things happen in football. And nobody knew that this could happen. Whether you get disappointed or not, am I going to drown myself in a disappointment bucket or am I going to move on?
“You just have to move on, because these things happen. But it happened too early.”
Komphela went on to discuss that it became a good exercise to see how team reacts to going a man down.
“All that I said was ‘ok, Steve, now you’re one man down, then it’s a responsibility of the team to learn how to play with one man down,” he added.
“Because we’ve not even gone to a stage at training where we are training two players down, three players down because we have to do it, if you are a coach.
“Because if you don’t train them to be three men down, if it happens in a match, you have a problem. If you’re four men down, the game has to be reconsidered because you need a minimum of seven players to play the game.
“It tells me that at training I’ve not even done one man down, so now when it happens here what do you do? You have to find a way, but again what do you take out of this – let’s learn how to play one man down.
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“First half, perfect. Second half, mistake. Even up until the end of the match we were playing one man down, even after changing personal you could see we started to disintegrate. They did not have the same cohesion and compactness like we did when we had Jali.”
