A 22nd-minute goal of some considerable ingenuity gave Orlando Pirates a morale-boosting, if dour, 1-0 Premier Soccer League (PSL) victory at Loftus on Sunday afternoon — although it was a winner that emerged as the product of a calamitous goalkeeping blunder by SuperSport United goalkeeper Dennis Onyongo.
Onyongo lost his balance in mid-air while attempting to gather a long, raking cross and dropped the ball at the feet of Pirates’s Mulondo Sikhwivhilu. With his back to the goal and seemingly guided by undetectable radar or an uncanny sixth sense, the recently signed Pirates striker then calmly back-heeled the ball into the empty net.
The defeat, largely against the run of play, was a crushing blow to SuperSport’s aspirations of annexing their first PSL title, while at the same time earning a place for Pirates in the top echelon of 10 teams who are vying for the top eight positions.
Ironically, however, Pirates’s recent resurgence under new Democratic Republic of Congo coach Bibey Mutombo has been accompanied by an increasingly less inventive and entertaining brand of soccer — which prompted one observer to suggest ”the worse they play, the more points they get”.
What Mutombo has seemingly done to turn around the fortunes of Pirates is to insert elements of discipline and tenacity into a team that was sadly lacking these essentials before.
And Pirates’s long-suffering fans in the boisterous Loftus crowd demonstrated clearly that as far as they are concerned, there is nothing as stimulating as winning.
For all this, the success of Pirates against SuperSport was accompanied by a fair slice of good fortune, with the M-Net-owned club dominating the second half, in particular, and at times only being thwarted by do-or-die tackling.
A sensational 70th-minute point-blank save by Francis Chansa in Pirates’a goal kept SuperSport at bay and Daine Klate neutralised a couple of dazzling bursts for goal by meekly attempting to pass to teammates who were less well-placed to provide an equaliser. — Sapa