Mamelodi Sundowns will host Amazulu at Loftus Stadium on Sunday, and Co-Head Coach Rulani Mokwena says he is expecting a difficult game against a rejuvenated Usuthu.
After 3 games in the DSTV Premiership, Sundowns are top of the table on 7 points, while Amazulu are 9th, 3 points behind.
Both teams go into this on the back of wins, with Sundowns having beat Cape Town City, while Amazulu picked up their first win of the season, at home against Black Leopards.
“Yah, they come into this match with a lot of confidence, because they beat Black Leopards 2-0, and they beat Black Leopards really, really convincingly, with a very dominant and a very strong performance,” Mokwena said.
“And they also coming into the game with a lot of good feelings in and around their space, because they’ve recruited well, they’ve signed some very good players, and qualitatively they’ve got a lot to offer, and we should expect a very competitive Amazulu this season.”
“And I think they’ll come into the game expecting to win, they got a very good result, even against Pirates, the performance was very good, against TS Galaxy they played extremely well, so they’re in a very good space, and we’ve got to be very humble approaching the match.”
Mokwena says they have tried to use the international break to work on a few things, but there have been challenges, with so many platers absent during the time.
“Yah, it’s been a good week, but a bit of a complicated week, in the sense that we’ve had time on the pitch, and time is very valuable when you’re a football team. You want to work on certain schemes, you want to improve certain aspects of your game, and you can only do that when you have time on the pitch. And we’ve tried to exhaust that time as best as we can.”
“We’ve had a couple of challenges, of course because we are a big club, we have a lot of internationals, and then we’ve had a few injury concerns. So we haven’t had everybody back to work on these things, because when you want to work on tactical schemes, you need players available on the pitch to be able to improve these things, so that has been a little bit of a challenge, but we’re not complaining, we’ve worked really hard.”
“We’ve put in a little bit of work, because we have not even hit the competitive part of the season, we are still in the first eight weeks of our periodisation, and that means we are still within the pre-season sort of space, this is the time to accumulate, not just from a physical perspective, but from a technical and tactical perspective.”
