Wydad Athletic Club head coach Sven Vandenbroeck admits they were dominated in their Champions League first-leg semi-final in Casablanca but warned that the away goal rule could prove crucial in their quest to eliminate Mamelodi Sundowns tomorrow.
Sundowns host the reigning champions at Loftus Versfeld on Saturday afternoon with the scoreline at 0-0 from the first leg at the Stade Mohamed V.
With Vandenbroeck only two weeks into the job, he faces a massive task in an attempt to qualify them for fourth final in the last eight seasons.
“On the plan of injury, [Bouly Junior Sambou] will try today, to train, we will see how fit he is after he left the pitch last Saturday, for the rest, everyone, who is here in South Africa is fit, so we just the striker who is doubtful, and Hicham Boussefiane is sick, all the others are 100% fit to play tomorrow,” Vandenbroeck said in the pre-match press conference.
Wydad arrived on Tuesday evening and have been based at the High-Performance Centre at the University of Pretoria to prepare for the highly-anticipated fixture and their Belgian tactical admits they have been working around the clock to rectify what went wrong at home.
“You saw last week, Sundowns dominated the game, after 10 minutes they have a good team, you can see the coach is there for a longer period, his hand on the team is quite obvious in offensive and defensive play, with a system not common in football.
“The four in midfield and two deep strikers is which is unusual in the Northern part of Africa, so it’s unusual and caused us a few problems in the first game. We tried to rectify everything in training [this week] so we hope to have a better image in the game.
“But after watching the last game, I will give Sundowns a little bit of chance to qualify and we’ll put the efforts in to try to beat them and, as you know, a goal away counts double so that can be an advantage to us.”
Former AS Monaco goalkeeper Yanis Henin, who was present alongside the coach echoed that Masandawana took them by surprise, but feels there’s confidence around the group to be able to get an historic result.
“It’s difficult to speak after the coach because he’s said it all, since we arrived we’ve been getting used to the weather and we’re not talking about what happened in the first game, it was quite difficult because we’re not used to playing the way we played,” Henin said.
“The team has a lot of quality, we’ve done some good things in the first half and we’ll try to win the game tomorrow.”
