Chiefs to rock Rollers

Kaizer Chiefs coach Stuart Baxter will try a few players for tomorrow night's CAF Champions League preliminary round tie against Township Rollers at Soccer City, with new striker David Zulu likely to start.

Zulu debuted on Wednesday, coming off the bench in the 86th minute of a 0-0 Absa Premiership draw against Bloemfontein Celtic at Free State Stadium.

Returning from the Africa Cup of Nations break, Chiefs extended their unbeaten PSL run to 19. They edged the chances against a fired-up Celtic, though also had nervous moments of their own.

Chiefs would ordinarily be expected to make fairly light work of Botswana champions Rollers, and Baxter will begin the task of managing his players with an eye to balancing league title aspirations with the continental competition.

"I've not done any homework on Rollers yet, to be honest," the coach said. "I didn't want to distract from this [game against Celtic] - it was an important one to get out of the blocks again, and not lose it.

"We're not going to weaken the team too much. We'll make a few changes. I threw David Zulu on against Celtic because I thought it was a 10-minute cameo where he doesn't have to worry too much about the shape of the team. That is the sort of rotation we'll be doing.

"Being the first leg, the objective is to score as many as you can without conceding so we don't have a knife to [our] throat in the second leg."

Chiefs meet Rollers, who arrived in SA yesterday, in the return leg in two weeks. The match will attract huge attention in Botswana, where Amakhosi have a large following.

Pitso Mosimane finally ventures into the Champions League this weekend, a competition the former Bafana Bafana coach has been talking about since the start of his tenure at Mamelodi Sundowns in December 2012.

The Brazilians' first opposition, St Michel from the Seychelles, have already stretched Mosimane in his attempts to find out more about his opening assignment.

Sundowns endured an arduous trip to honour their Valentine's Day preliminary fixture tomorrow, having left Johannesburg at midnight on Wednesday to arrive in Kenya at 5.30am yesterday. They then took a connecting flight to their final destination three hours later and landed in the Seychelles at 11.30am.

"We will sleep on the flight," Mosimane said prior to departure.

"That team is a closed book. They are not on TV, so how are you going to watch them? I sent Mike Ntombela [Downs technical director] and he saw a few things. I [also] asked a team in Zimbabwe that recently played and lost in Seychelles for more information. Apparently this team attacks like nothing."

Mosimane also revealed that the Champions League first leg would be played on an artificial pitch.

"You know the story. But there's no excuse because we said we want Champions League and now it is here. I will stick with a team that plays well and gets us the result."

Downs' last campaign in Africa's premium club competition was in 2008 when they only just missed out on making it into the group stages following a 4-3 aggregate defeat to Sudan's Al Hilal.