Nabi apologises after Chiefs exposed by Sundowns in Carling

Like some of his predecessors, Kaizer Chiefs coach Nasreddine Nabi was forced to apologise to the hordes of Amakhosi supporters the club disappointed with their 4-0 loss to Mamelodi Sundowns at the FNB Stadium on Saturday.

After a promising start to the season in which Chiefs had managed to beat Marumo Gallants and AmaZulu in the Betway Premiership and also beat SuperSport United 4-0 to reach the second round of the Carling Knockout Cup, Chiefs fans came to Saturday’s game with great hope.

This despite the fact Sundowns were one of the teams that had defeated them 2-1 in the league this season — the other one in the league being a 1-0 loss inflicted by SuperSport.

So six matches in all competitions, in which Chiefs had won two, drew one and lost two, had seemingly created an expectation by some of the Chiefs diehards that they could match Sundowns pound for pound in Saturday’s last-8 Carling tie.

It wasn’t to be, as the Brazilians outfoxed, out-thought and toyed with Amakhosi the entire match and there was a feeling the visitors could have won with a bigger margin if they didn’t take their foot off the pedal in the second half after going to the break leading 3-0.

In the end Nabi acknowledged there is a lot he still needs to work on for his side to come near where Sundowns are, but praised his players, especially the younger ones, for their efforts.

“I would like to apologise to our fans because today we were not good in any way, defensively in both boxes,” said the Tunisian.

“For that (poor showing) we apologise to our fans that are down tonight after the result, but we can promise that we’re going to work harder to make the team better, to improve the team.

“We knew that the team was not as ready as people would think but today was an incident that we believe will not happen again in the future.”

Nabi explained that Sundowns dominated them the entire match and one of the reasons was because of the injuries suffered during the match and the red card that the skipper of the day Inacio Miguel received a few minutes after the restart.

“Somehow I share your assessment that the players were not good today, but the responsibility is mine as a coach. I’m going to take responsibility for today’s game because I don’t want to criticise my players in front of the media but I’ll do it inside,” Nabi added.

“Everyone will take his responsibility, but I believe it’s true that they were far from the best performance because even at the beginning of the game they showed nervousness, a lot of mistakes and a lot of miss passes with a lot of balls lost and so on.”

Asked if he could have changed his approach to the game given the fact that Sundowns were pressing them so high, Nabi said it’s not easy to just change your way of playing.

“It would be very simple if you have to change your way of playing, your game plan every day. It’s true that we played against a quality team, which was pressing high and we knew that’s going to happen.

“But what do we need? Do we need to play long balls to Vilakazi and the other players? — no. Instead we want to improve our quality of play. We were a bit nervous and we needed to improve our decision making, improve our technique and our confidence with teammates because sometimes we get the ball but your teammate doesn’t have time to ask for the ball.

“Yes Sundowns were pressing but we made bad decisions. In how we want to play there were a lot of situations but most of the time today we made bad decisions because we were aware that for an example that the wide players were wide open.

“We wanted to play through the middle which was very difficult and this is our part of the learning curve. But we believe it’s going to improve our team. Now we have to go back to the drawing board and improve ourselves.”

Chiefs’ improvement should hopefully start showing in their next league game at home to Richards Bay on November 27. The match will be played at the Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane in three weeks’ time, giving Nabi and his technical team more than enough time to fine-tune their deflated charges.