Maritzburg ‘a little bit lucky’ to beat Chiefs – Tinkler

Maritzburg United coach Eric Tinkler admits his charges were fortunate to beat Kaizer Chiefs over the weekend.

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The Team of Choice claimed a 2-1 win over Amakhosi in a league match at the FNB Stadium on Saturday night.

Dylon Claasen scored a brace for Tinkler’s side, while Samir Nurkovic grabbed the consolation goal for Chiefs.

“I thought our first-half performance was not great at all to be brutally honest and I’ll take full responsibility for that, because as I mentioned, I made some tactical changes and I was trying to be a little bit too clever and obviously it didn’t work for us in that first half,” Tinkler told SuperSport TV after the match.

“Even in the first half I had to make a change, I had to put Siyanda [Xulu] to play with the back three but ultimately we were way too defensive. We were looking to soak up a lot of pressure and we were really poor in that first half.

“So, unfortunately, I had to sacrifice Siyanda, as I said, not a fault of his rather by mine, go back to our normal structure, bring Pogiso [Sanoka] out and far better performance in the second half.

“I think you know we started to look a lot more organised, we looked a lot better going forward, we started to create chances and we got the goals but we had to hang on, to be honest. They’re (Chiefs) always going to be a threat from set-pieces, that’s been their biggest strength this season, the amount of goals they scored from that, they got one.

“Then we had to hold on to be brutally honest. Ja we’ll take the three points and run, it wasn’t a great first half, better second half but maybe we can count ourselves a little bit lucky today.”

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