Lyle Foster of South Africa leaving the field injured during the international friendly match between South Africa and Zambia at Royal Bafokeng Stadium, Rustenburg. (Samuel Shivambu/BackpagePix)
Ntseki said this after his team lost 2-1 to Zambia in an international friendly in Phokeng on Sunday.
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Foster was substituted in the first five minutes of the game after failing to recover from an injury and was replaced by Keagan Dolly.
“If you lose a player in the second minute of the game, it messes up everything. I think it was a huge setback to lose Lyle in the beginning of the game and the plan was not to make substitutions as early as we did,” Ntseki told SABC Sport after the game.
“That did not give us the rhythm that we were looking for. We kept on giving the ball away. In the first half, we played like a team with no confidence and that’s what really killed the momentum in the team. We gave away too many corner kicks early in the game. I tried to push them, to give them the confidence and the belief.
“We spoke about it at half-time, we addressed the issues we saw in the first half. That’s why when we started in the second half, it was a better performance,” added Ntseki.
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The Bafana mentor was not happy that his team threw away the lead in the dying minutes of the match.
“When you concede two goals in a game like this in the second half, there are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself defensively. These are professionals. They are fully aware of those situations,” said Ntseki.
“We’ll go back and look at the game itself and do the analysis and when we report for camp, we will be addressing those negative issues.”
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