Sundowns close in on another record following Royal AM win

Mamelodi Sundowns have broken just about every DStv Premiership record you can think of this season. They are on the verge of yet another milestone with three games remaining this campaign. The Brazilians are on 69 points after 27 games and one more victory will see them set a new record for most points accumulated in a 30-game league season.

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The current record of 71 points was set by the Sundowns team that played under former coach Pitso Mosimane in the 2015/16 season, where they recorded 22 wins, five draws and lost three matches. Masandawana are still unbeaten in this campaign with 21 victories, while six games ended in draws.

Sundowns have also stretched their overall unbeaten run to 51 league matches and Rulani Mokwena offered an interesting response when asked if his record-breaking team is being appreciated enough by the South African public.

“There are two ways to look at it because history has no blank pages and there’s going to be something written about this group. I don’t know what is going to be written but there will be something written about them,” Mokwena said.

“I watch a lot of national geographic and what happens in the wildlife. There’s an interesting story I saw the other day about the story of the crow and eagle. If you go into it, you will find that the crow will always be on the back of the eagle biting its neck but the eagle never fights, but it ascends to greater heights up until the crow loses oxygen and falls off.

“That for me is a big lesson in life that you may have people on your back that are maybe not appreciating you and talking negatively about you. The reality is that what you should be doing instead of using that energy to fight those people, you should be like the eagle and ascend to even greater heights because you eventually get to a point that you’re so high they can’t maintain it anymore and start to fall off.”

Flexibility

Despite a number of his first choice regulars being rested due to what has been a gruelling schedule, Mokwena praised his side’s flexibility following the 2-0 win over Royal AM on Tuesday.

“At Sundowns we don’t train for 11 players, we train the entire team so there are certain principles an schemes that we adopt and everyone knows what they have to do in certain moments and for some it takes longer than others that’s why it’s not always easy for the adaption of players who join us in January without a pre-season,” he said.

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“To be honest with you, the approach that we take a technical team is that we don’t just train the team but the group in order to understand the principles of how we want to play.”