Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler has confirmed that his side brought in three new faces ahead of the second half of the season, as well as the long-term injury of defender Nathan Fasika.
The Congolese international picked a bad knee injury and chances are slim that he will feature this season again, as reported by iDiski Times.
City, aware of the severity of the injury, quickly brought in former Kaizer Chiefs defender Lorenzo Gordinho to close the gap left by the impressive and steely Congolese defender.
“We unfortunately lost Fasika to a long-term injury. We needed to bring another central defender and we were very fortunate to have Lorenzo Gordinho available to bring him in immediately which was a bit of a gift at the end, managing to get that deal done,” Tinkler told the club’s media team.
On top of Gordinho, City signed Colombian striker Juan Camilo Zapata from Colmenarez and Bertrand Mani from Colombe Sport in his homeland in Cameroon, who is also a forward player.
“We’ve brought in a couple of new faces, with Bertrand Mani joining us as a striker,” he added.
“We hope that he will be able to get quite a few goals for us in the second half of the season. And also we brought in a Colombian player, Juan Zapata.
“In the videos that we watched of Zapata, we saw someone, not only the ability to create opportunities for others, but a player who has the ability to score goals.
“From our analysis of our first half of the season, it was the biggest area where he had problems. We are playing good football, creating so many chances but unfortunately not turning those chances into, most importantly, the goals in order to get the victories.
“So that has been the primary from us especially in the last two weeks of the pre-season that we are going through. So far we have a lot of positivity from what we are putting in.”
However, all of these players, including Gordinho, won’t feature when the club resumes the DStv Premiership following the FIFA World Cup against Royal AM on 30 December at DHL Stadium, because the FIFA transfer window has not officially opened.
City are lying 13th in the DStv Premiership with a paucity of 13 points after 12 matches.