Sometimes referred to as the Sea Robbers, a discordant Orlando Pirates dutifully stole away with a 2-0 victory at Athlone Stadium on Sunday afternoon after being outplayed for most of the SAA Supa8 game by Ajax Cape Town.
Late second-half goals from Bennet Chenene and Rudzani Ramadzuli against the run of play earned the Buccaneers a place in the semifinals alongside Mamelodi Sundowns, Jomo Cosmos and SuperSport United and eased the mounting pressure on inscrutable coach Bibey Mutombo, whose tenure at Pirates may have been close to receiving a termination notification with another failure in this rambling encounter.
Pirates, indeed, had no more than four clear-cut scoring opportunities against the 14 inviting chances that came Ajax’s way.
But as American baseball coach Leo Durocher once proclaimed ”a win is a win is a win”, and Mutombo and the Pirates players will breathe a lot easier.
Chenene’s angled, opening goal in the 71st minute left Ajax and former Bafana goalkeeper Hans Vonk cruelly off-balance following a deflection off one of his own defenders and Ramadzuli’s scoring effort in an extended 92nd minute ricocheted into the net off his chest.
It was that kind of game for the closely-knit Ajax, who played most of the composed soccer on view on a bumpy, uneven pitch and were only thwarted by several heroic saves from Francis Chansa in Pirates’ goal and some ungainly finishing that contrasted markedly to the team’s general professionalism.
As is usual, even when Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs play more than a thousand kilometres from their Soweto base, the vast majority in the 10 000 crowd were out-and-out supporters of the Buccaneers.
And it revealed much of the vagaries of the game how the earlier cries for Mutombo’s blood were transformed to generous applause after the final whistle.
Ajax’s Craig Rosslee looked on stoically throughout the proceedings as the gods refused to dispense any crumbs of luck in the direction of his team — even when one thunderous shot cannoned off the crossbar — and ultimately in apparent frustration the new coach made three late changes in the hope of discovering a pair of more potent football boots among those on the substitutes’ bench.
But it only made matters a lot worse after the dangerous Terror Fanteni carved huge gaps in the Pirates defence on a number of occasions only for his teammates to squander the resultant gilt-edged opportunities.
Tearaway Pirates defender Lucky Legwathi left the Ajax defence spread-eagled twice, only to finally shoot wildly himself on one occasion. — Sapa