Heric deals with fixture load

With just six months to finish their league programme, GladAfrica Championship teams are having to deal with new problems as the turnaround time between games has been shortened immensely.

It is the first time this season that first division clubs will have to play twice-a-week and Cape Town Spurs coach, Vladislav Heric has found a way to deal with it.

“I am fortunate that I have a very young squad. Half the players in my team are under 23-yearsold. The younger ones recover quicker, while a real recovery time should be 72 hours. That’s a luxury we will not have much of this time around and the younger ones can help in such situations,” Heric told Phakaaathi yesterday.

After playing their first game at home against Polokwane City last Friday, Spurs will be in Durban this afternoon, where they meet Royal AM at Chatsworth Stadium at 3.30pm.

“I deliberately used more younger players in our first game because I knew they’d be able to be up and running again for tomorrow’s (today’s) game. I will be able to play a more balanced team. We will not be taking their first game result (Royal AM lost 4-0 at Sekhukhune United) into account because that was their first game and you can’t read too much into it. They will be at home and wanting to make amends, so they may be more dangerous,” he said.

His own team let slip a 1- 0 lead and ended up sharing the spoils with Rise and Shine 1-1, but Heric is not worried about that.

“It was the first game and there will always be some problems as we get used to each other in a real game situation, so I can’t really read too much into that result. We could have won it but it wasn’t to be,” he said.

Jomo Cosmos, meanwhile, begin their campaign this afternoon against Sekhukhune,.

Ezenkosi had a bye last weekend as the PSL decided to allow promoted ABC Motsepe teams a further week to prepare.