SuperSport United coach Eric Tinkler is struggling to prioritise a cup competition that his club has made it its own in the past two seasons amid pressure to find a top eight position on the Absa Premiership table.
United are visiting Bloemfontein Celtic in the last-32 of the Nedbank Cup on Sunday‚ but Tinkler has openly admitted that his side’s priority has to be on their next three league matches against Platinum Stars‚ Ajax Cape Town and Mamelodi Sundowns.
“It’s going to be another tough encounter‚” said Tinkler of the clash against Phunya Sele Sele – the team who SuperSport beat 4-2 at home in the league last weekend.
“Our priority has to be the league as we have three massive league matches coming up in which two of them have to be extremely important.
“But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a squad to see us going through to the next round of the cup.”
With teams fighting for survival in the PSL‚ Tinkler said a similar situation about priorities might be lingering in the minds of the Celtic technical team.
“I’m sure Celtic will be asking themselves similar questions like we do about this competition‚” he said.
“It’s been an extremely rough period for us in the past 27 days where we played nine matches.
“The results weren’t that great if truth be told but we were obviously happy to get the result we got against Celtic last weekend.
“The fact that we managed to get four goals was a massive boost for us because that’s been an issue we have been having over the past month.”
Tinkler will be pining his hopes on Aubrey Modiba – one United player who has managed to maintain his form despite the heavy schedule they have had in both the PSL and Caf Confederation Cup‚ where Matsatsantsa finished runners-up to Democratic Republic of Congo club TP Mazembe in November.
“Aubrey Modiba is our top goal scorer (six in the league). He's had a fantastic season‚” SuperSport’s coach said.
“But not only this season‚ even last season he was actually with me at Cape Town City after coming back from the (2016 Rio) Olympics.
“He played in every Caf game‚ did not miss even one of those matches‚ has played the majority of our league games this season.
“So‚ is he a good player‚ does he have a good potential? Without a shadow of doubt.”
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