Mamelodi Sundowns head coach Rulani Mokwena has revealed why his team had a slow start in the 2022/23 season and how they sacrificed not winning all the cups.
Sundowns had a shaky start to the season by their standards and their patchy start, included elimination in the MTN8 semi-finals by Orlando Pirates, had triggered a reshuffle of the technical team in October last year, where the co-coaching arrangement was dismantled, with Mokwena then made the sole head coach.
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The 36-yead old tactician has revealed that they struggled early in the season because they had changed their system of playing despite winning the treble in the 2021/22 campaign.
"When the season started, I said to the players in pre-season, 'We're changing the system' and everyone looked at me (like), 'But why are we changing the system because how we were playing last season was giving us results, we won three trophies?'," Mokwena revealed on The Pitchside Podcast posted on Sundowns' official YouTube Channel.
"But because we had brought in different personnel and the challenge for the players is, how do we get better? And the best way to stimulate players to get better is by challenging them with something new.
"So, we looked at the squad that we had and said, 'OK, we're going for the diamond in midfield' because we had so many profiles of this number eight that you could easily use, Neo (Maema), (Marcelo) Allende, we had probably the best number 10 in the country, 'Mshishi' (Themba Zwane), very comfortable in that role to play behind the striker," he said.
"You still wanted to keep that continuation of playing with two strikers, because as a big club we feel we need to always have two strikers because it allows us to have presence in the box."
Mokwena went on and expanded that in the end, their processes brought satisfaction after they got praise from opposition coaches in the CAF Champions League and other coaches in Europe who watch their games.
"So, when we came with the diamond and explained how we wanted to play, inverted full-backs, we struggled a little bit to get going in the season, we were scrapping through results and the performances were not coming," he continued.
"But we trusted the process and we knew what we were doing were the right things and today (that is) one of our greatest strengths, when you speak to coaches of Al Ahly, Belouizdad and some of the coaches in Europe.
"One of the biggest things they speak about is our diamond, they speak about our ability to have the six in the right position all the time, the eights in the right position all the time, the 10 in the right position all the time," he added.
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