Zwane On Chiefs’ Conditioning – iDiski Times

Kaizer Chiefs head coach Arthur Zwane has said the club has paid a lot of attention on conditioning after they highlighted issues with this area in past seasons.

Chiefs take on Mamelodi Sundowns this afternoon at Loftus Stadium in a crunch DStv Premiership fixture.

Zwane said fitness and application is something that they had focussed on in preseason, and they had brought in different personnel to deal with players’ conditioning.

“I’m gonna be brutally honest,” Zwane told the media.

“For the past six to seven years, if you watch Kaizer Chiefs, we’ve been playing a game of two hours, it’s either we start well, we finish badly or we start badly then we finish the game very well.

“And it was clear that the problem was either the wrong playing personnel or the wrong people in terms of conditioning players. So if you can check who we brought, in terms of conditioning players, a sports scientist, and we did our homework, we profiled them, we knew that we need these kinds of people that can come and help the team.

“And now you can see, we can easily play with the same tempo, though, still a lot of mistakes here and there, which is key for us as a Kaizer Chiefs team that must be able to take the tempo, very high, so that the opposition didn’t cope more, especially when we’re playing at home. We must suffer and suffocate them here, and with the boys, we sit down and discuss all those things, and we show them.

“Some of the players couldn’t cover that 13 kilometres, in one game, but against Royal AM, there was one player who covered 15 kilometres in 90 minutes. In the preseason games, there’s a player who covered nine kilometres for just only 45 minutes. And previously, he covered maybe seven kilometres in the whole 90 minutes.

“So that alone tells you that a lot of our players were not working hard enough to play for Kaizer Chiefs or to win games. And that’s why we were playing games of two halves. So we had to dig deeper, we had to focus on that, we had to try and improve those aspects and those individuals to improve their game and be better.

“And I’m glad everyone is budging and everyone is showing a little bit of character and hunger again to play for the club. And like I said, that if you can cope with our sessions, because our sessions are highly explosive, and we’ll manage you, we know games will be coming thick and fast, but Kaizer Chiefs must play with tempo, it’s as simple as that.”

In this week’s  edition of iDiski Times we catch up with former Mamelodi Sundowns star Sibusiso Vilakazi as he talks about his ups and downs with the Brazilians, as well as his ambitions with TS Galaxy. We also hear from the newly appointed Chippa United coach, Daine Klate, who reveals what type of football he wants his team to play, and why he decided to take on one of the hottest seats in PSL coaching. There are also interviews with Kaitano Tembo and Jerry Tshabalala, as well as a preview of the highly anticipated battle between Kaizer Chiefs and Sundowns this weekend. Get this and more in the full edition of iDiski Times below: