Sundowns coach Manqoba Mngqithi says Pirates must be respected

Mamelodi Sundowns coach Manqoba Mngqithi has shown nothing but respect for Orlando Pirates ahead of their crunch DStv Premiership meeting at Orlando Stadium on Saturday.

The Brazilians and the Buccaneers meet in Soweto with the two teams enjoying a good run of form having both won their last two matches and yet to lose in the league so far this season.

Defending champions and current pacesetters Sundowns have won three of their four matches, while on the other hand Pirates boast two wins and as many draws since the season started a few weeks ago.

“The most important thing when it comes to matches like this is to always have a fair share of humility and respect,” said Mngqithi.

“No room for arrogance. We may have done well in the last few matches but we are facing a very good team that is on form. They have just played a very good game against Chippa United in the league where they showed their quality.

“We will give the match the respect it requires, but at the same time we will do our work by profiling them properly. We will do our analysis to see which areas we can capitalise on, and which areas they are strong in to make sure that we deal with that.

“We know that Pirates have always been one of the strongest teams in transition in the league, but that can also be a big weakness. For us it is important to have proper balance of dealing with their transition with good counter pressing and also some good defence.”

Mngqithi added that their mission is to try to get as many points as possible from his cycle of five matches.

“What we have emphasised as the technical team, other coaches we work with and everybody else around is to take care of the process and the process is the number of points that we want to achieve in each cycle.

“Whoever happens to be our opponents in that space, we focus on making sure that we achieve our desired targets and we achieve the number of points we are looking for.

“If Pirates is the team that must give us the points that will help us to achieve our target, then [so be it]. We are focusing more on the process in making sure everybody understands that three points against Pirates, Baroka, TS Galaxy or whoever can help us achieve our ultimate objective targets.”