Amazulu's recently adopted slogan "Only The Brave" becomes extremely pertinent this week as the club continue with their MTN8 derby against Golden Arrows despite the untimely death of defender Jan Masoeng Sillo.
The 33-year-old rightback was killed in a car accident early Tuesday morning while travelling back to Durban from a short visit to his family, a pregnant wife and child, in Botshabelo in Free State.
"We will need to wipe our tears away and fight like warriors," AmaZulu spokesman Philani Mabaso said yesterday while confirming that, due to fixture congestion and the Cup nature of the game, the club had not asked for a postponement of the clash with Arrows in the first leg of the MTN8 semi-finals at Chatsworth Stadium on Sunday (3pm kick-off).
Moreover, Usuthu's players believe "Sillo would have wanted us to continue with the game", according to Mabaso.
"We sat down as a club to look at the fixture and eventually decided to go ahead with it. We looked at our other fixtures coming up and realised it would have been hard to postpone this one because of us already been scheduled to play on weekends and Wednesdays," explained Mabaso.
"If it was a league fixture, it would have been fairly easy to push it back to sometime later in the season, but it's a big Cup game and there is a special time frame for the competition to run. You have to consider obligations to sponsors and so on.
"Moreover, the players said Sillo would have wanted them to carry on with the game. So, they have carried on with the normal training schedule, apart from asking the club to bring in pastors to hold an informal prayer service, which we did this morning."
In the absence of Sillo, new signing Alastair Wallis or Simangaliso Biyela will get a chance to play at rightback on Sunday.
Siboniso "Jomo" Gumede would normally be the first choice as cover for that position, but he is already being used to overcome the loss of leftback Mark van Heerden through suspension.
Van Heerden sits out his second match after collecting a needless red card in Usuthu's knockout victory over SuperSport United at Chatsworth Stadium last Tuesday night, but will become available again when coach Neil Tovey's side face Platinum Stars in their next league match at Royal Bafokeng Stadium next Wednesday.