Hunt: All of us need to challenge Sundowns

Being Mamelodi Sundowns’ direct rival automatically means that SuperSport United should try their best to upset the defending DStv Premiership champions

The bragging rights in the capital city, to be fair, have been owned by Masandawana for quite a while.

SuperSport head coach Gavin Hunt did land a punch on Sundowns last time they met in the league and he is plotting for a bigger sucker punch as he wants to guide United to the league title, and ultimately end Sundowns’ dominance. Downs have claimed the last five league titles in the country.

However, the former Kaizer Chiefs mentor knows that a league is a marathon, having won it four times in his career.

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“The hardest thing is to get to the top and the second hardest thing is to stay there,” said Hunt.

“We have to maintain a certain level of consistency if we are to get better, and we need to get better. You have to get a little bit lucky as well but we all have to make the league more competitive. How do we do that? I don’t know,” he added.

The Spartans have won three of their last five games, putting them in a good position as the league has gone into the Fifa World Cup break. Everyone may be penciling United as title contenders, but Hunt is rather modest about it.

“We need to be good over 30 games. We can’t get ahead of ourselves and we are nowhere near the teams that we had here before, in terms of the quality and the mentality.

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“But we can build that. Winning games does help but we have not reached our full potential,” he said, before he waded in on the recent structural change in Masandawana’s technical team, and the axing of John Maduka and Kaitano Tembo from Maritzburg United and Sekhukhune respectively.

“It is the nature of the business. If teams are at the bottom of the log, the coach is going to be under pressure. If the team is underachieving, someone will be under pressure and that is just the nature of football more so in South Africa. But … what other clubs do has nothing to do with me. I can only comment when we play them.”