COACH CALLS FOR IMPROVEMENT DESPITE PLK CITY WIN
8 March 2020
There were several areas of play which head coach Eric Tinkler was not entirely happy with during Friday night’s Absa Premiership win over Polokwane City.
The Team of Choice were on top for large periods of the game, but in front of a full house at the Harry Gwala Stadium, they struggled to create clear-cut scoring chances against Rise and Shine.
In the end it took an 82nd minute corner from Dan Morgan and an excellent header from Daylon Claasen to secure the points and a fourth consecutive league win.
But United were far from their best over the 90 minutes.
“I don’t think we started well,” coach Eric admitted. “In the first half we looked to over-elaborate too much. I think we were playing more to entertain the fans than for the result. So I wasn’t very happy with the performance in the first half.
“We knew that they were here looking for a point, they were trying to slow the game down as much as possible because ultimately they couldn’t handle our speed, especially on the transition.
“And we didn’t recognise that early enough – there were a lot of spaces in between the lines where we could receive, turn….but instead we were looking to play backwards and sideways. We spoke about it at half time looking to try and rectify it,” he continued.
“But not a great performance today – we didn’t look to penetrate enough, we didn’t look to get in behind them enough.
“Once we got in the wide areas the quality of the crosses wasn’t enough, we didn’t get the guys in the right areas. Hence the fact that we didn’t look like we were going to score to be honest.
“The only time we looked likely to score was from set pieces and we ended up getting the goal from that.”
The Maritzburg contingent now have two weeks to fine tune their game ahead of the next fixture – away at Black Leopards on March 21.
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