Tembo lauds Chiefs discard after draw with Sundowns

Sekhukhune United head coach Kaitano Tembo was impressed with former Kaizer Chiefs defender Daniel Cardoso, who was solid for Babina Noko in a hard fought 1-1 draw with DStv defending champions Mamelodi Sundowns on Saturday.

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“Cardoso has been brilliant from day one, he has been tops,” said Tembo.

“He’s got good football intelligence when it comes to defending and he communicates very well with the guys. He has shown some good leadership qualities and he has been playing very well since we started,” he added.

While Cardoso was instrumental in defence, skipper Linda Mntambo was pulling the strings in attack and he scored a cracker of a goal post Ronwen Williams. However, Tembo says he needs more attack-minded players to raise their hands and help the team move forward.

“We will try to work with what we have and try to improve the players. Linda was very good but he needed a lot of help so we had Roderick Kabwe, who I thought was much better on the ball, but he did not give us that against Sundowns. We had to bring in someone who is more defensive minded, and that is (Pogiso) Mahlangu. This was to try and allow Linda to go forward a bit more and that helped us,” said Tembo.

“Abednego Mosiatlhaga came and gave us a good outlet and whenever we had to go forward, he was available. But we still need more from players like Thami Masiya, he needs to contribute more in our attacking structure because we are a little bit thin in terms of that. We will keep on putting in the work and I think we will get better,” he added.

Part of Tembo’s plan to chisel out a draw against the Brazilians was keeping Peter Shalulile quiet in the second half. The Namibian snipper was not given much space to breathe and he was tightly marked, much to the delight of Tembo.

“Shalulile always tries to play on the shoulder of the defenders and in the last 10 minutes we had to bring in an extra defender when they brought in another attacker in Thabiso Kutumela. We had to make sure that there was someone who picked up Shalulile and Kutumela. They could not find joy in the wide areas because we dealt with that.”