Changes likely at Chiefs as Middendorp counts cost

Kaizer Chiefs coach Ernst Middendorp was disappointed with his team’s performance as they could not reach the levels he wanted in the 1-0 Absa Premiership defeat to lowly Baroka FC at the FNB Stadium on Saturday night.

The defeat all but put paid to their Premiership chances as they are still eight points behind the leaders with five games to go.

Tshediso Patjie scored with a brilliant free-kick to give Bakgaga a rare win which eased their relegation worries. Making just one change from the team who destroyed Cape Town City in a Nedbank Cup game just a week before, Middendorp was looking for his team to build from their performance but instead it dropped drastically.

The coach admitted that his side gave just 25% of what they delivered against City as his team could not complement their big win in the Nedbank Cup over a week ago with another worthy performance.

“If you take today’s performance and compare it with last weekend’s, we were just about 25% of that today,” said Middendorp after the match at the FNB Stadium.

“This squad had done a lot of things right a week ago. I highlighted the entire week that we needed to go into this game with the same attitude, but there was something missing. We fielded the same team but the performance was not the same,” he said.

Middendorp made it clear it was undesirable that his team could only reserve their best performances for cup games.

“We have to fix it. Something like this should not happen again. We were about 25% of the performance we had against City. It was disappointing. We’ll now have to put other players in.”

Baroka coach Wedson Nyirenda was happy with the result, saying it was what they needed as a defeat would have put them deeper into the relegation quagmire. But Baroka are far from safe as they jumped one place to 14th with the same number of points as Free State Stars who have a game in hand.

“We had the better of things in the first half because we didn’t give Chiefs space to play. All we needed was the character,” said Nyirenda.

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