Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler has revealed the team practised taking penalties for three days straight prior to the MTN8 final against Mamelodi Sundowns.
The Citizens missed the chance to clinch their second MTN8 title after they were fell to a 3-2 defeat on penalties after the game ended 1-1 after extra time.
City bagged two goals from the spot-kick in the shoot-out but Sundowns goalkeeper Denis Onyango proved to be the difference as he saved five penalties to see his side crowned champions.
“I feel for the boys you know, tough to lose in the penalty shoot-outs, it’s always Russian roulette,” Tinkler told SuperSport TV after the game.
“I promise you, you can train all you want, we practised three days solid after training, when you put them in this situation, people melt. Unfortunately, the pressure seems to be big and you can’t replicate that in a training session.
“But congratulations, exceptional team, difficult team to break down, I thought we defended well, so many clever players in the team, they still found solutions, they still created opportunities.
“We found it difficult to contain them you know but with the quality they have, you make a mistake, you lose the ball in the wrong areas you get punished for that and that’s how they took the lead.
“But I thought the boys responded well, we just needed to be a little bit patient on the ball, we needed not to panic, I thought there were periods where we started to panic, gave the ball away too cheaply, because we were growing a bit frustrated.
“And I think we changed the formation and started to control the match a lot better, got ourselves back into the game and potentially with one or two situations we could have gone on and won it,” he went on.
“But it all changed when [Idumba] Fasik got the red-card, now it was try to hang on as long as we could, to try and take it to penalties and hopefully win it there but it didn’t work out for us.
“We felt we were 1-0 down, we were only pressing with Fagrie in the first half, so we needed to press a little bit higher, at the same time, their movements, they were hurting us in between the centre-back and full-back.
“[Themba] Zwane was a constant threat every time he found the half spaces, so I thought it was important to change to a back-three, which what we did. We brought Terrence [Mashego] on and I thought that made quite a big difference immediately.
“We started to contain them a little better, we started to pick up the balls a lot quicker and we started to find each other with a lot more ease, which led to us getting the equaliser, the changes made an immediate impact,” Tinkler concluded.
