Mamelodi Sundowns co-head coach Rulani Mokwena has given insight into the signing of Surprise Ralani from Cape Town City, and why despite questions about his age, he is the right player for the club.
The DStv Premiership champions have made a few high profile recruitments this transfer window, and have already announced Ralani and Teboho Mokoena. The club is expected to announce their new Bolivian recruit, Erwin Saavedra shortly.
Now the Sundowns coach has elaborated in depth on why Ralani was recruited.
“Ralani’s recruitment, of course clearly brings a lot of question marks particularly because of his age,” Mokwena told the club’s media department.
“But in football, probably the most important thing in recruitment is always tried to bring the right player, and sometimes the right player is not the player between a certain age.
“The right players sometimes is because of the needs of the team and how do you improve the quality and the strength of the team? Of course, there’s two ways, one is by training, to use the type of players that you have, to try to improve certain aspects, therefore improve the different components of the team.
“Secondly, you can do that by recruiting players and we’ve decided to go that type of direction because of the profile of player that Ralani is, if you look at Ralani in terms of contribution to Cape Town City, and you make a direct comparison to the type of player that he is, his profile, the average quality in the PSL League and its availability within the market, two, and three, you also look at what you have in relation to the direction that you’d like the team to go towards.
“If you begin with the end in mind, trying to make sure that the team is ready for Champions League, there are certain parameters that the team has got to meet. And obviously in that moment, you are trying to improve the team, to make sure that it is competitive on all fronts.
Mokwena says that Ralani’s statistics, across the board, are some of the most impressive in the league.
“So Ralani is what we would call an outlier,” he continued.
“His numbers suggest that there is a huge difference between Ralani and and the average performances in the PSL. Ralani is already contributing to 1.4, on average, scoring opportunities as an offensive midfielder. The average in the PSL is 0.378. That’s almost twice the number of scoring opportunities that Ralani can create.
“Ralani is also measuring about 6.5 key passes in a game. 6.5 key passes in a game as compared to 6.37 key passes, and that already at 34 those numbers are higher than what you would normally get in the PSL. His ball progression, in other words his dribbling, he’s averaging 4.1 successful dribbles in a match as compared to 2.3 on average for offensive midfielders in this league.
“And not only that, even his defensive game, he’s winning duels at 1.1. So those are the number of successful duels that he is winning every single time, on average during during 90 minutes. That gives you as compared to the average in the PSL – 0.018. So you also then look at where is a lot of those actions happening. And fortunately, he was playing for a team like Cape Town City that also acted with a lot of high press. And Ralani was winning 1.6 balls in very aggressive areas that resulted into chances, more than the average offensive midfielder in in the league at 0.4.
“So his numbers clearly suggested that he is a player that can come in and immediately contribute to to improving the squad. And when you have a player like that, that is the right profile, with the qualities from a technical tactical perspective, the data suggests that already.”
