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.
