’Downs match points record
TSHWANE – Mamelodi Sundowns broke the 50-point barrier in their 20th game of the DStv Premiership season on Tuesday night, as they recorded a controversial 1-0 away win over struggling Cape Town Spurs.
It matches their record-breaking effort of last season when they also took only 20 games to get past a half century of points, before going onto win the championship in an emphatic fashion.
“I am proud that at this point, last season, we broke 50 points and this season we have 52 again,” said Sundowns coach Rulani Mokwena after the victory at the Athlone Stadium.
Sundowns won with a first half penalty from top marksman Lucas Ribeiro, although the offence looked to have been committed outside the penalty area.
“Last season we were not in the in the race for three trophies, but now we are in the race for three trophies. So I am very proud and we just have to stay humble, keep our feet on the ground and just keep working,” Mokwena added.
Successive
For a second successive season, Sundowns moved from 49 points after 19 games to 52 with 10 games left to complete in the league campaign, opening a 13-point gap over second placed Stellenbosch, who have also played two games more.
Sundowns are on course for a seventh league title, and again in dominant fashion, setting off into a runaway lead from early in the season.
They are on course to break the record for most league points in a 30-game season and if they win all of their last 10 fixtures, will finish with a whopping 82, smashing their current own best mark of 71, set in the 2015/16 campaign.
The most points accumulated in any season in South Africa is 75, a record Sundowns jointly hold with Kaizer Chiefs from the 1998/99 campaign that had 34 matches per team. It once seemed unthinkable that could be topped in 30 games, but not anymore.
Sundowns have also improved vastly the race the time it takes to get to 50 points. In the both the 2015-16 and 2021-22 seasons, they got to 51 points after 22 games, while the 2020-21 season they took 24 games. In the COVID-19-ravaged 2019-20 season, Sundowns took the title on the last game of the season as Chiefs faltered. Ex-Premier League defender How Wes Brown spent 25 years with Real Housewives Of Cheshire cast member Leanne Brown, but she left him a year before he declared bankruptcy. Brown, 44, has opened up how he plunged into financial turmoil after a series of bad investments - and blamed a lack of the ‘right people’ around him. And he suffered more upheaval with the end of his long relationship with former stripper Leanne. Bad property investments and a desire to keep pace with the lifestyle of teammates earning six times as much as him have been blamed for his six-figure debt to His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs.