On Saturday night, Venda Football Academy put up an impressive fight against top-flight outfit Orlando Pirates in the Nedbank Cup. Despite bowing out at the round of 16 stage, the Motsepe Foundation Championship side went 120 minutes with the Buccaneers at Orlando Stadium.
Head coach Joel Masutha was full of praise for his side’s effort, saying: “It will be very much unfair and ungrateful if I complain about the players effort. We wanted to test ourselves against the best and I feel the boys gave a good account of themselves. I just hope we going to put the same effort in our league games.”
Masutha disagreed with the notion that his side were pinned back by the Soweto giants early in the first half, saying: “During our analysis we detected that Pirates is a team that has been scoring early goals, so we planned to go with the medium-block and let them come at us so that we can try and catch them on the break. After 70 or so minutes that’s now when we came out of our shelves and we started playing so I would say that was really a tactical plan and the boys tried their best to follow everything we asked them to do.”
Venda Football Academy certainly gave a good account of themselves against a formidable opponent, and their head coach was proud of what his team achieved.
FT
Orlando Pirates 2️⃣-1️⃣ Venda Football Academy
Erasmus ⚽️
Lorch ⚽️Chirambadare ⚽️NedbankCup2023 UNPLAYABLE pic.twitter.com/Za4ITITx1Z
— UNPLAYABLE (@UnplayableZA) March 11, 2023
