Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler was disappointed with the result as they lost MTN8 final to Mamelodi Sundowns.
The Citizens failed to clinch their second title of the competition after going down 3-2 on penalties at Moses Mabhida Stadium on Saturday evening.
The City coach did reveal that his side practiced penalties but still ended up missing five because of the pressure that comes with taking a spot kick in a final.
“Yeah, obviously I feel for the boys, tough to lose it the way you lose it, penalty shootout is always rationale,” Tinkler said on SuperSport TV after the match.
“You can train all you want, I promise you can train all you want. We practiced three days solid penalties after training.
“When you put them in the situation, people melt. Unfortunately the pressure seems to be big, and you can’t replicate that in the training session, unfortunately.”
Tinkler, though, was not much frustrated with his side’s display, saying the players gave their best on the match and explained how he tried to change the game.
“But congratulations to Sundowns, exceptional team, difficult team to break down. We defended quite well, but there are so many clever players in the team. They still found situations, they still found solutions, and they still created opportunities.
“And we found it difficult to contain them. But with the quality they have you make a mistake. You lose the ball in the wrong areas, and you get punished for that, and that’s how they took the lead.
“And I thought the boys responded well, we just needed to be a bit more patient on the ball we needed not to panic. There were periods where we started to panic and give the ball away cheaply, because we were getting a bit frustrated.
“And then I think we changed the formation, and we started to control the match, we got ourselves back into the game and potentially with one or two situations that we could have gone on and won it you know, but that all changed when Fasika got the red card.
“Now it was dying last as long as we could to try and take it to penalties and hopefully win it there, but even that didn’t work for us tonight. I think we looked at it, we felt that we were one-nil down, and we were only pressing with Fagrie in the first half, so we needed to press a little higher at the same time.
“Their movement were hurting us in between the centre-back and fullback. Zwane was a constant threat every time he found the half spaces.
“So I thought it was important to change to a back three, which is what we have done we brought Terrence on. And so that made quite a big difference immediately, you know, we started to contain them a lot better we started to become the balls a lot quicker.
“And we started to find each other with a lot more easy, which obviously led to create opportunity of us getting the equalizer. So I think the changes we made an immediate impact.”
