Durban — Orlando Pirates travel to the Peter Mokaba Stadium for a difficult test against Mamelodi Sundowns in the second leg of their MTN8 semi-final on Saturday.
The Buccaneers, coming off a victory over Golden Arrows, are preparing to take on their ‘bogey’ side. The Sea Robbers have won just one of their last 10 encounters against Sundowns.
Even with a single victory, four draws and five defeats in that period, the club’s new coach Jose Riveiro has waved away concerns regarding their inability to overcome Sundowns and has reiterated that the most important match is the next one.
“The most important thing for us is how we’re going to play in the next game, the past doesn’t have any bearing in this game. There are a lot of interesting things to discuss about the game but the past isn’t one of them.”
The two sides could not be separated in the first leg of this semi-final, the game finishing in one of the most entertaining goalless draws of recent times. Riveiro’s men matched a high quality Sundowns side for everything in that encounter.
The Spanish mentor revealed that he and his technical team had no ‘specialised’ plans for Sundowns but would rather focus on their strength and how they could come up with their plan to win and reach the final.
“We approach this game like we did the first, we don’t think about the names but we focus on what we want to produce in every game and the structure we’re gonna use to achieve our objectives,” said Riveiro.
Pirates hold a weirdly unwanted record of having scored just a single goal in the second half in all of the 14 matches they’ve played in all competitions, a stat that Riveiro believes shouldn’t be put to questions of fitness or mentality.
“There’s never a single reason why things happen in football and if we analysed all of our games, you would see that,” he explained.
“So therefore it’s never a question of our fitness, we still provide the same energy after 50 or 60 minutes but depending on the result of the game at the time it’s just an unusual chance that it becomes so because we create a lot of opportunities in the second half as well.”
IOL Sport