Cape Town - Football doesn’t allow for any lengthy bouts of festivity - and equally no time to sulk about disappointment suffered in a previous game.
Wipe out your eyes and it’s time to prepare for the next 90 minutes. And Mamelodi Sundowns know this better than most teams, considering their congested fixture list every season.
Often it is about managing the celebrations for Sundowns, rather than having to pick themselves up. But that’s the situation the Premiership champions find themselves in ahead of hosting Stellenbosch FC at Loftus on Wednesday.
It’s been a rather strange start to the season for Sundowns. Emphatic victories over championship rivals Cape Town City (2-0) and Kaizer Chiefs (4-0) have been achieved, but it's been interspersed with a shock 1-0 defeat to TS Galaxy and a 1-1 draw with Sekhukhune United this past weekend.
This has left Sundowns in the unfamiliar position of looking up at opponents on the league standings. While it's still early into the season, it has provided the rest of the teams with at least some hope that the Chloorkop club can possibly be overthrown.
“Obviously it’s two points dropped (against Sekhukhune). At Sundowns, a draw is like a loss. Whenever we draw, it feels like that after the game, you can see the guys, the emotions and all those things. It feels like a loss,” Sundowns wing-back Lyle Lakay said on Tuesday.
“If you look at the game and the chances we had in the first half, we should have been three or four up. But we now just need to forget about it and focus on the next match.”
Sundowns’ challenge certainly doesn’t get any easier as they prepare to host a Stellenbosch side that did not relent in the face of the yellow-and-blue juggernaut last season.
Steve Barker’s team picked up four points from a possible six against Sundowns last term, with a memorable 3-0 thrashing of the Brazilians at Loftus to etch into the memory bank.
The Winelands club may have off-loaded talisman Ashley du Preez, who scored a brace in the Loftus mauling, and defensive stalwart Zitha Kwinika to Kaizer Chiefs in the close season, but the visitors still pose a formidable threat.
Livewire winger Junior Mendieta has been in sparkling form, having added an aerial threat with a couple of headed goals to his already silky footwork and along with the pacy Jayden Adams will run at the Sundowns defence all day.
“People will obviously look at our two previous seasons against Stellies … I won’t say we’ve struggled, but they have been a tough opponent for us,” Lakay said.
“We know Stellies is a young team, full of energy, lots of pace. Obviously, they lost Du Preez to Chiefs, but even without him they are still a threat with the youngsters in the team.
“If you look at their recent form in the league, they have been on a high. We are looking forward to it. They are a young team, lots of energy, and obviously we do our analysis on every team and try to figure out their strong points and try to rectify what we did wrong in the previous game so that we can rectify it in this game.”
@ZaahierAdams