Orlando Pirates coach Jose Riveiro has given an explanation as to how his side were dissected as if they were a lab rat by Mamelodi Sundowns in the final of the Carling
Black Label Cup at the FNB Stadium on Saturday night.
Sundowns smashed the Buccaneers 4-0 to take home R3 million winners cheque.
Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and AmaZulu, who were part of the four-team tournament, will each get R2 million. The other 12 PSL clubs will each get R100,000 for being part of the voting competition.
“It cannot be one reason why we lost, there are multi-factors,” said Riveiro after their embarrassing loss. “It is difficult to describe, we are talking about a very special day, a very particular day, it is difficult to do football analysis.
Obviously two games, different starting line-ups and then 11 against 10 players and that numerical disadvantage we could not manage. We lost control of the game but I am really proud of the boys for the way they were competing. In the second half, we managed to be well organised and we did not suffer so much,” he added.
“I think both teams were very tired, I lost count of players that our opponents substituted because of injuries and the rhythm of the game was really bad. The fact that we played with 10 players was an issue.
“Like I said, it is a particular tournament and you can use the rules in the way that you want, we can do a lot of substitutions. We have 25 players on the game list. But the players are not electronic devices that you can plug in, charge their batteries and be ready to play – all of them have different issues. We have to deal with different circumstances with the resources we have today.
You can have players on the bench but that does not mean that they are ready to play, we had to deal with the resources that we have. I am extremely proud of how the guys behaved the whole week, from the final, the whole week, they managed to compete,” Riveiro explained further.
“We managed to reach the finals but it was just too much for us, we kept on trying and we have to move on. The two games were totally different, we did not manage to create chances in order to evaluate them. The second game was a different story, a team like Sundowns will dominate the ball, so our strikers in the second game I need to evaluate our strikers. The responsibility of scoring goals is on all the players and not just the strikers. But there were many positive things that came out.”
“We will work on playing better during the break, we need to be better in every department, better in every scenario and better when our opponents are pressing high and also when we cannot dominate with the ball. We have been together for four months now, I think we are a better team than four months ago. The future is going to be interesting for us as a group, we will have decent time to rest and do other things with our lives, spend time with families and get the energy to be back soon and be ready to play against Sundowns again on December 31,” he added.
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