City could have buried Chiefs by an avalanche of goals, says Tinkler

Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler believes they should have buried Kaizer Chiefs by an avalanche of goals on Tuesday night.

City beat Amakhosi 2-0 in their fast-paced DStv Premiership encounter at Cape Town Stadium but missed numerous scoring chances to put their visitors to the sword further.

Their first win in 2022-23 lifted the Citizens from bottom of the standings to 12th spot after a frustrating start to the season where Tinkler’s team has lost three and drew two of their opening five games.

“A fantastic performance from us in the first half, in my humble opinion I think we should have come in with three or four,” Tinkler said, reflecting on a first-half performance where Taahir Goedeman, Darwin Gonzalez and Wayde Lekay squandered good scoring opportunities.

“We knew that in the wide spaces, we could hurt them and we did that extremely well. I don’t think that they expected us to be playing direct, we were a bit more direct and I thought the team responded extremely well.”

Though satisfied with the morale-boosting victory, Tinkler was not impressed that his attackers missed a number of scoring opportunities in the first half.

“You can rue your chances sometimes when you keep on missing like we missed in the first half, there is always that fear. Coming in at the break I said to them that we can’t sit back and try to absorb pressure.

“I said we needed to go and find that second and possibly the third goal, take our chances and be better in the final third. They are a team that likes to play in small spaces and they are difficult to contain because of the amount of bodies they send forward.

“They take lots of risks in attack and I thought we exploited that very well. Even towards the end in the second half we wanted to exploit that better and we did. I thought everybody played at the intensity and aggression that we needed against Chiefs and everybody put in a shift.

“I was told by the medical staff that Terence Mashego would have 45 minutes [in him] but I ended up playing him longer and constantly talking to him to check whether he was OK or not.

“Eventually he told me that he was done, but everybody put in a shift and I am extremely happy — I thought we controlled the match and should have won more comfortably.”