While Amakhosi are currently at the summit of the Absa Premiership standings with the Brazilians in second place, ‘Jingles’ is of the view that Chiefs seeing themselves as their adversaries is actually a fallacy.
After all, he reasons, Sundowns are back-to-back league champions and have won the CAF Champions League and have been competing in the continent’s premier club knockout competition annually for the last six years, while Chiefs last won the championship four seasons ago and are non-entities in African football.
“You have to run the same Comrades Marathon and then you can tell me about Comrades Marathon. As long as you don’t run this Comrades Marathon, you don’t understand it because you don’t know that you are forced to make changes. You don’t know how to make eight changes. You don’t know how is the mood of Telkom Knockout compared to this game. This game, it is a difficult game. You come from a Telkom game where you’ve just reached the final and the mood is high. You can get too excited and trip. Sometimes it helps to put those who were not part of the Telkom. They want their own celebration and they did well,” Mosimane explained after his team beat AmaZulu 2-0 on Tuesday night.
Sundowns are currently in the group stage of the CAF Champions League. The other local team still involved in continental competition is Bidvest Wits, who are competing in the round robin stage of the CAF Confederation Cup.