Tinkler: City must win away too

Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler Photo by: Chris Ricco

Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler Photo by: Chris Ricco

Published Sep 28, 2016

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Cape Town - Cape Town City had done well to score a “great goal”, but let themselves down by making a defensive mistake to concede an equaliser against Highlands Park on Tuesday.

That was the feeling of City coach Eric Tinkler after the new Premiership outfit took a 1-0 lead in the 69th minute through an outstanding strike by captain Lebogang Manyama at the Makhulong Stadium in Tembisa on Tuesday night, but gave away a goal three minutes later.

Highlands Park found veteran striker Collins Mbesuma in the box, and the Zambian rifled home a left-footed pile-driver that left City goalkeeper Shu-aib Walters with no chance to stop the ball from going into the left corner of the net.

“The first half wasn’t great. We were quite poor, to be honest. We knew that they were a team who weren’t looking to play from the back – they hit the long one, Collins would look to flick on and (Charlton) Mashumba would look to get in behind – and from there going wide and putting in crosses. And we allowed them to do all of that in the first half, which was extremely disappointing,” Tinkler told SuperSport TV in a post-match interview.

“We made the change before halftime by taking (Roland) Putsche off and going back to our usual formation, and I thought it was a better second half in patches. We get a great goal, and then we let ourselves down by allowing them to do exactly what we said they would do – one long ball in behind our defence to Collins Mbesuma, because of his talent, he’ll punish you.

“So, disappointed. But we take the point and move on to the next game.”

But that next game is only on October 15 against Baroka FC due to the upcoming MTN8 final on Saturday, as well as Bafana Bafana’s international dates on October 8 and 12 against Burkina Faso in a World Cup qualifier in Ouagadougou, followed by a friendly against Ghana in Durban.

So Tinkler is glad that he will have three weeks to work on the team’s defensive and attacking shape. “There is a lot to work on because you can’t produce the type of performance that you did against Ajax (last Friday in a 1-0 win), and three days later, truthfully I said to the players at halftime ‘We looked very amateurish’ – the type of mistakes we were making, the decisions we were making were extremely poor,” he said.

“You can’t go away from home and think ‘we must just win our home games’ – no, you’ve got to do it away, and we got a point. Yes, we came here for three, but you need to fight for every single one of them. We’ve got to change that, we can’t allow that to continue.”

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