Mamelodi Sundowns will come at Cape Town City all guns blazing on Sunday at Lucas Moripe Stadium in the second leg of the MTN8 semifinal to make up for being eliminated in the group stage of the CAF Champions League.
The Brazilians missed out on an opportunity to advance to the quarterfinals of the Champions League for a third time in a row by playing to a goalless draw with Horoya on Tuesday at Lucas Moripe Stadium. Sundowns finished their campaign in third place in Group C, behind Wydad Casablanca and the Guinea champions. But they don’t have much time to lick their wounds as they have to overturn a 1-0 loss to the Citizens from the first leg of the MTN8 semifinal.
“We have to look at this loss to Horoya, how it came about,” Sundowns’ coach Pitso Mosimane said. “Obviously there are a lot of positives. The mentality is good. The attitude is good. The one thing that I can say is that we will give City the attack we gave Horoya, we will go at them. When you don’t have goals, it’s normal in a team.”
” The challenge is when you don’t create the chances to score. Then you know you have a problem. So we don’t have a problem to create the goals. The challenge is that we aren’t converting, and you saw that against Horoya.”
Mosimane looked back at the Brazilians’ Champions League campaign with regret on how the side gifted their opponents goals.
“It’s unfortunate that we have been eliminated,” Mosimane said. “We should have won in Guinea. We scored two goals, went 2-1 up and then conceded from a corner with five minutes left. We were 2-1 up in Horoya and there were no problems. But the biggest game for us is the game in Togo. There’s no way we should have lost that match. It’s unbelievable what happened in Togo.”
” I have never seen a game like that in my career. How many chances? It was worse than this one because the chances there were open, one against one with the goalkeeper three times. That’s where we lost this tournament.
“You saw the game against Wydad, we scored early into the match and a loss in concentration allowed them to come back and get a point.”
” That goal was a Christmas gift. You must be realistic and not cloud yourself with a lot of things that can be said or spoken and then you become clear of what happened. But as much as we have been in this tournament for four years in a row, we are still babies in this tournament. We play this tournament with the way South Africa plays, with a clean soul and fair play”
“We could have sat on the ground when we were 2-1 up against Horoya in Guinea, to do what happened here. I think about five players of them fell here. That’s the school fees that you pay. So when we do the same thing, you guys must bare with us because we can’t suffer like this. AS Vita did the same thing. It’s horses for courses. But you can’t complain that people sit down. You had 90 minutes to score. For me, it looks ugly. It doesn’t look good. It’s bad for football.”
