‘Spineless! Embarrassing! Lacking in courage and conviction! Iffy and butty! The worst I’ve ever seen!”
Stuart Baxter is a hard man to please. On an evening when many felt his team did well to hold on to their unbeaten run with a come-from-behind 2-2 draw against Platinum Stars, the Kaizer Chiefs coach was berating his team’s showing as unworthy of being added to this collection of games.
“The first 45 minutes was probably the worst I’ve ever seen,” said the man who has presided over 75 league matches for Amakhosi. “The first half was as spineless as I’ve seen. We made a couple of mistakes in the beginning and presented them with the goal (scored by Robert Ng’ambi on eight minutes). In terms of passing and movement it was an embarrassment at times.”
So embarrassing was Amakhosi’s performance in the initial stanza that they conceded two goals for the first time in the league this season, Eleazor Rodgers putting Stars back in the lead in the 44th after Siphiwe Tshabalala had equalised.
Baxter so did not like what he saw that he considered making three changes at half-time.
“We came in at half-time and I needed to change things,” he explained after the match. “I was contemplating three changes but I thought let me give the lads who started 10 minutes and it didn’t get any better in terms of quality.”
Baxter was particularly irked by the casual manner in which Chiefs gave away possession to their opponents. “Lots of teams, when they play us, think about our attacking fullbacks and counter-attacking in behind them. But that’s not usually a tactic that works very well because we are so good with the ball. We don’t give up that many transitions. And if they do that we have a strategy.
“Now what we did tonight, we gave the ball away in so many bad positions that it put the fear of death into people. But our structure and our strategies to deal with that we were all over the place. So I had to make a change in the structure.” The structural change meant a switch to three centrebacks and a position on the outside for substitute Erick Mathoho as essentially a man-marker with Mandla Masango adding extra pace on the winger and Bernard Parker upfront.
“Tower (Mathoho) being quick I slid him across to the side to take care of the lad (Mahlatse Makudubele) that was countering us on the right. I pushed Mandla on at wingback as an extra winger and him and Shabba played there and tried to get us through.
“And we tried to get Bernard as an extra striker to deal with crosses. And I thought it worked well for 20 minutes; we raised the level of quality and we raised the intensity.”
In that time Chiefs found the equaliser via Tefu Mash-amaite’s header from a Tshabalala cross.
But then it all went pear-shaped again, leaving the Chiefs coach livid. “In the last 15 minutes it could have gone either way, it could have been 4-3 either way. But then we fell back into this. I don’t know how to say it – lack of courage, lack of conviction. It was sort of iffy and butty all the time.
“Yeah, probably a good game for the crowd but not for me. I am going to put this into the category of bad day in the office. Yes, the fact we got the point is great … we still keep trundling along. But they’re gonna have to raise their level, almost everybody.” - The Star