Kaizer Chiefs at a crossroads
South African football’s iconic club has made its worst start in history to the new season and desperately needs a win over Cape Town City tomorrow to stop the rot.
The Kaizer Chiefs squad of 2018-19 has already set the record for the worst start to a league season in the club’s history, which is fast approaching a half century of professional football.
Five matches without a win from the start of a new season represent a new low for the ailing Soweto giants and has left them down among the strugglers in the Premier Soccer League standings. Although it is admittedly still early in the season, when last were Chiefs down in 13th place? The answer is never!
It means they go into tomorrow’s clash away at Cape Town City under an enormous amount of pressure.
There is always an expectation that Chiefs should be challenging for titles and cup trophies, but times are changing rapidly for the “Glamour Boys”. A lot of their lustre is disappearing - at a rapid rate - and unless the club turns around more than three seasons of failure, they will lose their prominent place at the table of South African football and eventually sink.
It is not overdramatic to say they are at a crossroads and a win at the Cape Town Stadium tomorrow would be a massive fillip for them.
It might be that the cards are in their favour. City, under Benni McCarthy for a second season, are competing in the MTN8 final later this month - for a second successive year against SuperSport United - and it is difficult for any coach to keep his players’ minds on the old mantra of “one game at a time” when a cup final is looming.
McCarthy hit the nail on the head this when he said: “It is very difficult because, for me, I focus game to game and I try and impose the same on my players. But you know when you reach a final and it’s around the corner, players start saying, ‘I need to save myself, I can’t miss that’, so they don’t really go into these kinds of games 100 percent.”
It is an admission that suggests Chiefs could come away with a win in Cape Town tomorrow, especially if they get some decent backing from their fickle fans.