Sundowns’s greed and lack of shrewdness hurt their Champions League campaign

I must say that it didn’t surprise me that Mamelodi Sundowns failed to overturn the 1-0 deficit from last weekend’s first leg of their CAF Champions League semi-final against Esperance de Tunis on Friday, or that they lost the second leg, too, for that matter.

I knew very well that something like that could happen, despite the fact that Sundowns actually play the better football when comparing the two teams, and that they had the advantage of playing Friday’s return leg at Loftus Versfeld. It’s happened far too often that they fail in that kind of challenge, especially against North African sides. So, simply put, there was too little evidence to truly believe that Friday’s result could be in their favour.

That they went into that game without having scored an away goal in Tunisia made it all the more uphill.

But that’s not to suggest that they didn’t try. I actually thought they played very well and that their long-ball approach experiment actually worked to some degree. But they, for some reason, just didn’t look like they were going to score on the night. Coach Rulani Mokwena started the match without his talismanic captain Themba Zwane, Aubrey Modiba, who played well in Tunisia at central midfield, or Thembinkosi Lorch, despite all three being fit, as far as we know. It could have been a tactical move or an admission that his best players are too tired to start in those kinds of high-intensity and high-pressure games.

Which brings me to the reason why I believe Sundowns sabotaged their own Champions Legaue campaign. Friday’s match was Sundowns’s forty-eighth this season! And for many of their players, that’s not to mention the international matches they’ve played during this campaign. There’s an inordinate amount of travelling in between all of that, too, which makes it easy to understand why the freshness – physical and mental – has long gone.

They’ve simply played too much football in too short a space of time to continually play at the high level that we know they can. And it’s unfortunate because something could have actually been done to avert this: subtracting the six games they played in the African Football League, which they won in the first half of the season, could have made a huge difference.

In that eight-team tournament, Sundowns had to travel to Angola, Egypt, and Morocco to play Petro de Luanda, Al Ahly, and Wydad Athletic Club when they actually didn’t have to. Like I argued in the last piece that I wrote on this blog, the club should have foreseen the risks involved in participating in an additional tournament in a season as busy as this one was and declined the invitation to be a part of it.

But they didn’t because they were greedy for success. They behaved like a club desperate to win something this season as if they don’t already win something every season.

Now they are out of the Champions League but are still left with an insane schedule that should be mentally exhausting to just look at for everyone involved. The next league match is on Monday, against TS Galaxy, followed closely by a visit to Kaizer Chiefs on Thursday, before they head down to Stellenbosch to play their Nedbank Cup semi-final. And after all of that, they’ll still be left with six league games and, depending on how they do on Sunday, yet another cup final to contest.

One wonders how they will manage that when they’re already as exhausted as they are. Luckily, the Kaizer Chiefs game could see them win the league title with matches to spare as they already hold a massive lead on the log.

There’s still the possibility of they finishing the season with a treble of trophies, which, needless to say, would be grerat consolation after what happened on Friday, but they will first have to work for that. We could have been talking now about the possibility of a treble that includes the Champions League, had it not been for their lack of shrewdness and foresight.

The football community will tell you that it isn’t quite a ‘treble’ if it doesn’t include the continent’s premier club competition.

* Featured image: CAF Online