Tinkler reveals City strategy for Sundowns encounter

Eric Tinkler has revealed that he had to tweak his usual match preparation routine ahead of the MTN8 final against Mamelodi Sundowns on Saturday in Durban.

Tinkler says the occasion has forced him to slightly stray away from the regular drills in order to calm his players ahead of the storm at the Moses Mabhida Stadium.

“Being a final, you know there is going to be some butterflies and my job is to try and avoid that stress that players are going to go through,” said Tinkler.

“In the preparation, we did not do much video analysis that what we would usually do, we also included other aspects such as looking for motivational videos because players worry about what they are going to wear to the stadium in the final and things like ‘is my girlfriend allowed to travel’,” Tinkler said lightheartedly.

“You want to get those issues out of the way as soon as possible. We had to get all of those things ironed out earlier on the week so we could get to the main business which is to try and win the trophy and the prize money. The players get a massive portion of that and hopefully have a good Christmas period,” the City coach added.

One thing that he did not compromise on in his preparation is working on his rear guard as Sundowns possess some of the finest attackers in the whole of the Premier Soccer League and in that, Tinkler is aware that the likes of Abbubaker Mobara, Terrence Mashego, Craig Martin, or whoever he trust to form the wall of his defence, should raise their game.  

“Defensively we have to be a lot better against the quality that Sundowns will bring but at the same time we have to focus on where our strengths lie and last season we were the second highest scoring team in the league after Sundowns,” said Tinkler.

He adds: “Before this game, we scored four goals against Swallows and four against Golden Arrows so it shows that we are a good team in attack. We want to entertain and put the ball in the box through our creativity and movement and what I have seen is that we can hurt teams when we do that, so that will be our objective and try to break Sundowns down.”