On getting knocked out of the CAF Confederation Cup
The entire experience of playing in this tournament was just normal, nothing different to what we have experienced. Obviously, we were drawn against three North African teams (USM Alger from Algeria, Modern Future from Egypt and Al Hilal from Libya) and that meant a lot of travelling for the team. But overall, I think it was a good experience for everyone in the team. When the tournament started, our intentions were to blood in youngsters. That is always going to be our intention because of our (domestic football) programme. I mean, you can’t do what we are doing – we are playing our home matches in Polokwane.
The club was quite happy for me to field youngsters, that was the plan. That is what we have to do in order to balance things between domestic football and African football. We have to use our squad and we also need to see who we are playing, who we’re playing the next game and then plan around the fixtures in terms of how we are going to go about doing it. We played this past weekend, travelled to Cape Town to play Cape Town City three days later, fly back to Joburg on Thursday, travel to Algeria on Friday to play USM Alger and then back on Tuesday. We have to play against Polokwane City on Wednesday and then play AmaZulu FC on Saturday. I mean, how else are you going to do that? You must also consider that when we travel to Algeria, we have to go via Dubai, play a match in Algeria. And when we fly back, we have to fly back via Dubai again and arrive back in Johannesburg on Tuesday and then play on Wednesday. How are you going to do that? You can’t do that!
