While Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler was pleased to get the 2-1 win over Sekhukhune United, he says it was a tough game and they had to soak up a lot of pressure.
City beat Sekhukhune in Cape Town on Saturday, a result that saw him move into the top eight again.
Tinkler says Sekhukhune have proved to be tough opposition, and it was no different on Saturday.
The City coach had hoped to get another goal in the second half, but said Macdonald Makhubedu’s team made life difficult.
“This was always gonna be a tough game against Sekhukhune because they’ve already shown this season, they’re not an easy team to beat,” Tinkler told the club’s media department.
“They’re a team that looks to defend very, very deep in a defensive block, make it very difficult for the opposition.
“They’re very aggressive in terms of their marking strategies. And then they’re a team that is very, very dangerous breaking on the counter-attack, and they’ve won a number of goals using this tactic.
“We obviously have the memory of a first-round game against them there, where we ended up losing 1-0, even though we dominated, we created the most chances, we had the most box entries, and all of that meant nothing. They caught us once on the counter-attack and beat us 1-0.
“So we knew this was going to be tough. We knew that opportunities that come we need to ensure that finish them off. We got a very early goal, catching them actually on the counter and had two, three chances to to extend our lead.
“A little bit complacent, lose the ball in the midfield, get caught and they make it 1-1. And then get the 2-1 lead through their mistake again, fortunately, goalkeeper makes an error, Mayo wins the ball and Mayo sticks it home and go in at halftime 2-1.
“I explained to the players that need to stick to what we planned in the first half. There was space for us to penetrate in the wide areas in the channels, and whenever we did that, we created problems, we created most of our chances through that. And we needed to continue that in the second half.
“But most importantly, we needed to go and find the third goal. We had, I lost count, 5, 6, 7 great chances to extend the lead and we didn’t, we were woeful in front of goal, and then we had to soak up a lot of pressure in the last 10, 15 minutes.
“Because they started to really play a lot more direct. They threw all the big boys up front. We had to win a lot of second balls. We were giving away silly fouls, silly free kicks, in and around our box.
“And we ended up having to defend for our lives. We didn’t put our foot on the ball when I thought we should have, there was a period where we put them under pressure, we had like three, four corners.
“We kept it in their half and we needed to do it in that last 15 minute period but we didn’t, we tended to give it away and ja, tough 2-1 win at the end of the day.”
