Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler wasn't too happy with the way his side used of the ball in their goalless draw against newly crowned DStv Premiership champions Mamelodi Sundowns on Tuesday.
It was a match tight affair from the start with chances few and far between, but City stood their ground and, on a few occasions posed the host problems.
"We knew obviously it wasn't going to be an easy match. Sundowns are a quality team. The way we set ourselves up today, we were obviously looking to be a lot better in our possession, especially in our build-up phase," Tinkler told SuperSport TV.
Read | Champs Sundowns held by ten-man CT City
"You know, there were three – four situations especially in the first half where we gave the ball away cheaply and we had to scramble a lot.
"But there were maybe another three -four situations where we got out of that initial press and that's when we looked dangerous so we needed to see a little bit more of that.
"That free-flowing football and move the ball a lot more with speed. We know they are a very good counter-pressing team. They got a lot of numbers around the ball and we struggled to get it out of those tight situations quick enough and early enough, you know," he added.
Tinkler shed light on how they hoped that the Sundowns full-backs would play deep and planned for Thamsanqa Mkhize and Darwin Gonzalez to go at them.
"And, also in terms of our wingers today Thami and Darwin, you know we were hoping that their full-backs would play a lot deeper but they didn't and actually pushed on high.
"So, we needed to utilise the space in behind them a little bit better and we spoke about that at halftime. We created one or two chances but so did they in that first half.
"And in the second half, once I made that change with Ambina because they were overloading that middle of the park with Maema, Mokena and Allende, you know.
"We needed to fix that and Ambina came in and I thought we dealt with that a lot better but then once he got the red card.
"That obviously put us on the back-foot and we now had to obviously look to play on the counter and hold out as much as we possibly could so brave performance, hard-working performance from the team.
"You know, today I called that a freebie to the players. I said you need to use this as a freebie, nobody cares you know because they are all expecting that you going to lose today.
"So go out there and express yourselves and play without fear, but I still felt that we didn't do that. We could've done it a little bit better," Tinkler said.
You must be Sign In to read and post comments.
Click here to register: Sign In