With all three goals from Wits on Tuesday, the ChiefsĀ defence was sucked out of position too easily.
It must be exciting to be a Kaizer Chiefs fan. Imagine waking up every gameday without knowing what to expect from your team. Excellence? Failure? Hilarity? All are equally likely when you throw on your favourite yellow-and-black shirt.
After threatening stability in the opening game of the Premier Soccer League, the Glamour Boys swiftly proceeded to regress to the team that fell over itself at the finish line last season.
The draw against Sundowns at Loftus was a solid result. Bar a few spurned Khama Billiat runs, their threat wasnāt overly discernible but they ensured the champions were subdued. It set the right tone.
Those same notes went missing three days later. The BidVest Wits game was a disaster, proving the road to major honours will have plenty of winding detours.
This weekendās MTN8 represents an opportunity to hit the right notes. After his rather late appointment, coach Giovanni Solinas was always going to struggle to make an immediate impact with this team. Now, with only three games to a final, the competition will allow the Italian to experiment, nail down his preferred set-up andpossibly also capturea morale-boosting trophy.
Full-back Ramahlwe Mphahlele, on the sidelines of the MTN8ās launch event at Park Station last week, revealed Solinas is not wasting time in implementing the club mission to rekindle past triumphs.
āHeās a very aggressive coach; he wants perfection, he wants us to work hard, he wants a change in that mentality,ā he said. āThree years is not nice for Kaizer Chiefs but weāll keep fighting. If we as players give up then whoās going to bring the trophy? No one else is going to bring it; itās us.ā
It is those three lean years that will probably ensure the pressure continues to shadow the new coachās every move. Steve Komphela brought nothing to the trophy cabinet in that time, stumbling when the situation demanded that his team rise high. By the end of his tenure, some of the fans were even willing to remove him bodily from the position.
Evidently, some tried. The Amakhosi support base was the subject of some despicable violence last season. Most notably, the Nedbank Cup semifinal against Saturdayās opponents Free State Stars delivered horrific scenes of stadium fires, vandalised TV cameras and beaten stewards.
Memories of being pelted with projectiles will not easily escape the playersā minds and Mphahlele admitted that it is an added motivation going into this one.
āWeāre playing Free State Stars; theyāre a very good team with a very good coach,ā he said. āThey beat us last season in the semifinals of the Nedbank. You guys know what happened after that game — they threw bottles and chairs at us.
āItās a new season. The nice thing about football is it always gives you another opportunity to try and win again.ā
With all three goals from Wits on Tuesday, the Chiefsā defence was sucked out of position too easily. They drifted out to the ball carrier without giving appropriate consideration to the runs being made around them. Solinas was probably given a thorough rebuke by Daniel Cardoso and Eric Mathobo for that — he can rightly expect far better from the experienced pair.
Itās creaks in that vein that he will hope to silence on Saturday. For him, the MTN8 is great timing. He has felt the temperature of the PSL and now he can jump out of the water for a weekend and test his gear. He does so knowing that, should he slip, itās unlikely heāll be given the time Komphela was.