TS Galaxy Head Coach Owen Da Gama was pleased with his team’s 3-1 win over Black Leopards on Wednesday, but was full praise for his opponents.
The victory lifted Galaxy to 7th on the DStv Premiership, with the team now on 26 points.
Da Gama said they did their homework on Leopards, but admits his team took the foot off the pedal in the second half, and were definitely tiring as the game wore on.
“Look, when we did the analysis on Black Leopards, we clearly found that there’s a big gap between the central defenders and the fullbacks and we tried to exploit that,” Da Gama said after the win.
“And also the fact that they had a new central defender. So that was a new pairing of of (Tsepo) Matsimbi and (Edwin) Gyimah there for the first time, that we know. So we knew that we’ve got to try and put as much pressure on them because they have not really played a lot together, put a lot of pressure on them, go directly at them.”
“But we had to win the important balls in the midfield, which (Mlungisi) Mbunjana and and (Bathusi) Aubaas did very, very well. We knew that their key players is (Mohammad) Anas and Lifa (Hlongwane). They were absolutely fantastic. They are such good players. And we knew that they going to give us trouble. They are really good players. I think Anas has scored two goals in the last two games. So we knew we’ve got it coming our way from a defensive point of view. And if we just defend well, we’ll always have a chance to win.”
“So yes, you know, I’ve never seen a team lead 2-0 and score four goals in the second half. It doesn’t. Even if you’re leading 5-0, there’s no ways, sometimes you struggle to get one goal. So I think the boys just took the foot off the pedal. And, you know, they started thinking that the game is won, and an all credit must go to Black Leopards, they put a lot of pressure on us, kept the ball well.”
“We tried to defend as best as possible. But there were some times some very tired legs in defense, these boys, since we’ve come, we’ve upped the tempo of training, we’ve upped the tempo in the game, and I think these boys they need a bit of a breather, they need a bit of a break, because you could see in the last 20 minutes, our legs were gone. So we will try and recover. We’ll try and do our best and we’ll keep trying to improve.”
