Nabi apologises after Chiefs exposed by Sundowns

Like some of his predecessors, Kaizer Chiefs coach Nasreddine Nabi was forced to apologise to the hordes of Amakhosi supporters the club disappointed with their 4-0 loss to Mamelodi Sundowns at the FNB Stadium on Saturday.

After a promising start to the season in which Chiefs beat Marumo Gallants and AmaZulu in the Premier Soccer League and also beat SuperSport United 4-0 to reach the second round of the Carling Knockout Cup, Chiefs fans came to Saturday’s game with great expectations. .

This despite the fact Sundowns were one of the teams that had defeated them 2-1 in the league — the other being a 1-0 loss inflicted by SuperSport.

So six matches in all competitions, in which Chiefs had won two, drew one and lost two, had seemingly created an expectation by some of the Chiefs diehards that they could match Sundowns pound for pound in Saturday’s last-8 Carling tie.

It wasn’t to be, as the Brazilians outfoxed, out-thought and toyed with Amakhosi the entire match and there was a feeling the visitors could have won by a bigger margin if they didn’t take their foot off the pedal in the second half after going to the break leading 3-0.

In the end Nabi acknowledged there is a lot he still needs to work on for his side to match Sundowns, but praised his players, especially the younger ones, for their efforts.

“I would like to apologise to our fans because today we were not good in any way, defensively in both boxes,” said the Tunisian.

“For that [poor showing] we apologise to our fans that are down tonight after the result, but we can promise we’re going to work harder to improve the team.

“We knew that the team were not as ready as people would think but today was an incident that we believe will not happen again.”

Nabi explained that Sundowns dominated them the entire match and one of the reasons was because of the injuries suffered during the match and the red card that the skipper of the day, Inacio Miguel, received a few minutes after the restart.

“Somehow I share your assessment that the players were not good today, but the responsibility is mine as a coach. I’m going to take responsibility for today’s game because I don’t want to criticise my players in front of the media, but I’ll do it inside,” Nabi added.

“Everyone will take his responsibility, but I believe it’s true that theirs was far from the best performance because even at the beginning of the game they showed nervousness, a lot of mistakes and a lot of missed passes with a lot of balls lost.”

Asked if he could have changed his approach to the game given the fact that Sundowns were pressing them so high, Nabi said it’s not easy to just change your way of playing.

“It would be very simple if you have to change your way of playing, your game plan every day. It’s true that we played against a quality team, which was pressing high and we knew that was going to happen.

“But what do we need? Do we need to play long balls to [Mfundo] Vilakazi and the other players? No. Instead, we want to improve our quality of play.

“Yes, Sundowns were pressing but we made bad decisions. In how we want to play there were a lot of situations, but most of the time today we made bad decisions because we were aware, for an example, that the wide players were wide open.

“We wanted to play through the middle, which was very difficult, and this is our part of the learning curve. But we believe it’s going to improve our team. Now we have to go back to the drawing board and improve ourselves.”