admindespite him warning them during the week not to take them slightly.
“AmaZulu defended very well, they stopped us from playing as well and that made it difficult for us,” the coach says.
“But we were poor, our passing was poor, our commitment, the way we started the game was very bad. We got better in the second half and it’s something that we spoke about the whole week, about being too complacent. You look at the log table and you think, ‘AmaZulu at home?’ — and that’s what we warned the players about. It showed in the first 15 or 20 minutes definitely, we were better in the second half, we tried and AmaZulu also stopped us,” De Sa adds.
The coach also admits that his side struggled to create chances when they were not using wingers.
“We didn’t have two wingers in the first half, probably that’s one of the reasons we didn’t create enough opportunities. We went back to our normal 4-3-3 system and we started to create more problems. We created very few opportunities and maybe if we could have done that from the outset — but we don’t know what could have been. But well done to AmaZulu, I thought at one stage they were holding up for a point and they did the job,” De Sa said.
AmaZulu coach Roger Palmgren says he hopes this result will be a turning point following their poor start to the season.
“My philosophy is to try to win the games both home and away, but depending who you play against, you are always happy to have a point away from the big teams like Pirates are. “I also think that Pirates were the better team and deserved to win, but my boys fought very hard. I think we played well in the first half, organised defensively. But after 15 minutes in the second half we started to lose the structure a little bit.
“At the same time, Pirates put more pressure on us, we were not that creative and productive with the way we handled the ball.”
Online Reporter