Former TS Galaxy midfielder Xola Mlambo has hit back at ex-coach Sead Ramovic, saying he was disappointed with the coach’ methods or the lack of at their time at the Rockets.
Mlambo, 34, had his contract terminated prematurely at the Mpumalanga based outfit in February 2023, having signed for the club in July 2022 for two seasons.
At the time the player said he felt he was targeted by the coach, while Ramovic himself went on to call the former Orlando Pirates man “lazy”.
After Ramovic’s CR Belouizdad recently lost to Rulani Mokwena’s MC Alger, Mlambo insisted the former Sundowns coach is a much better tactician, claiming he felt some of Ramovic’s training drills were searched off the internet and his team talks were uninspiring.
“It’s not maybe that I don’t like the guy, or whatever the case may be, it’s just the principles that you need to follow,” said Mlambo when speaking to Andile Ncube on Sports Night Amplified.
“And if you have to put Rulani and Sead here, I’ll say Rulani any day, because that guy is a technical genius, tactical genius, how he plans how he does things.
“I don’t like speaking much about coaches but one incident that I can give to you is that when we were in the change room with Sead, half-time the team is under pressure, the only thing he’ll tell you ‘guys, you have 45 minutes’.
“I mean, what does that say? It tells you about the quality of the coach that he was. I worked under the guy man, you must stop listening to people here say whatsoever, get Villa [Sibusiso Vilakazi] maybe one day to tell you the truth as to how the training session [was].
“Somewhere, somehow, the exercises were googled, like we once did the Arsenal thing. He was like, we’ve seen this thing playing the music and the speakers, when are you going to be creative as an individual come with your own things.
“And before we go into the game, what I remember that he used to tell us was ‘Guys, we have 90 minutes. If we don’t concede, we don’t lose the game’. And it’s so sad, man.
“It’s just that as soccer players, sometimes we are scared to speak the truth because people hate you for talking the truth, they don’t want to associate themselves with you and all of that. But it’s okay to be hated for the truth.
“Many that we’ve played with, they know those were the talks that we had in the change room where the chairman needed to step in and coach individuals.
“It was so sad for me to watch that, because I worked with coach Rulani, and I was coached by coach Ted [Dumitru]. And I was so shocked by a person who held a higher qualification in coaching to behave and do things the way that he was doing.”
