Mamelodi Sundowns moved back to the top of the Multichoice Diski Challenge (MDC) table after beating Kaizer Chiefs 1-0 at the King Zwelithini Stadium on Sunday afternoon in the penultimate game of the season.
The log leaders Celtic lost 3-2 to Ajax Cape Town on Saturday afternoon.
Mamelodi Sundowns coach, David Notoane
“Of course I am excited. It is very important to take it game by game. You know, it was in our hands but we dropped it and now it’s back in our hands. I am happy with the three points, considering the situation we were in over the past few weeks.
“One needs to give Chiefs credit, they pushed us till the end. I knew they would be title contenders when I saw them play early in the season. I am very happy with the boys and how they performed here today.
“It is more important to develop. We play this tournament in order to develop, that is our main priority. I could have brought in a few of the senior players if we winning was our priority. I could have brought in the likes of Zakri from the first team.
Kaizer Chiefs coach, Arthur Zwane
“It was always going to be a tight one because of the quality of the coaches and players here today. It was one of those games where it could have gone either way. We were not clinical enough.
“It wasn’t to be and I could fault anyone. We had a game against Chippa earlier in the season where we should have scored at least 13 goals but I we didn’t. Then we had two games against Pirates and Celtic (respectively) where we dropped four valuable points. Had we won those matches, we would have been in a good position.
Maritzburg United coach, Maahier Davids
“I was never in the race. For us, it was about giving players like Banele some game time to check his progress, to see where he is and how far he is. I gave a 14-year old goalkeeper a chance, if I was in the race do think I would play a 14 year old instead of an experienced player if I really want to win the league?
“The difficult thing or challenge is you have to develop but you have to develop winners. The Media is doing fantastic job by promoting the players and MDC but the problem is that if the players get too focused on winning, it becomes more about the results. So you have to develop the playing style and develop the individual and developing a winning mentality.
“I’m very happy with the progress, our first game was against highlands Park and we had Bandile Shandu, Lebogang Maboe, Siphesihle Ndlovu in the middle; all these players started against Kaizer Chiefs last night. So in terms of this season’s progress we exceeded our expectations in terms of development.”
Nkueni Mayala, Polokwane City coach
“Every game we play we always create five chances to score goals but we fail to even score one and concede one then we end up losing, but we don’t want to complain we have ourselves to blame. Football is unpredictable. If it’s not your day, it’s not your day and if it’s not your season, it’s not.
“ We believe that next season we’ll come back stronger, we know our strengths and weaknesses so we will go back , work hard and come back next season try to do better than this season.
“There’s nothing that happened today that we didn’t work on during training so we try to give them training in such a way they can express themselves or go beyond what they can do, that’s what we do at training. What you do at training is the reflection of what we will do during the game.”
MultiChoice Diski Challenge Results- 12 February 2017
Platinum Stars 2-0 Cape Town City
Free State Stars 3-2 Bidvest Wits
Highlands Park 2-2 SuperSport United
Maritzburg United 0-2 Polokwane City
Mamelodi Sundowns 1-0 Kaizer Chiefs
Written by: www.psl.co.za
