Mamelodi Sundowns joint-coach Rhulani Mokwena says that the season has not hit the competitive stage and that Downs are in their first phase of periodisation as they look to build themselves up not only physically but tactically as well.

The Brazilians are back in action following the international break on Sunday as they face AmaZulu FC at the Loftus Versfeld Stadium, in their fourth league encounter of the season.

The Downs coaching staff may have had the last two weeks with no competitive action, but many of the players in the squad were away on international duty which heavily affects the type of preparation and training done during the international break.

“It’s been a good week but a bit of a complicated week in a sense that we’ve had time on the pitch and time is very valuable when you are a football team you want to work on certain things and improve certain aspects of your game. You can only do that when you have time on the pitch,” Mokwena told the media.

“We have tried to exhaust that time as best as we can. We’ve had a couple of challenges, of course, because we are a big club and we had a lot of internationals and then we also had a few injury concerns.”

“So we haven’t had everybody back to work on these things and when you want to work on tactical schemes you need players available on the pitch to improve these things so that has been a little bit of a challenge but we are not complaining we worked today (Thursday) very hard. We still haven’t hit the competitive part of the season. We are still in the first 8 weeks of our periodisation and that means we are in the preseason sort of space and this is time to accumulate not just from a physical perspective but from a tactical perspective.”