Baxter lauds his youthful team
SuperSport United coach Stuart Baxter was full of praises for his team after Matsatsantsa A Pitori outclassed Golden Arrows 5-2 at the Lucas Moripe Stadium on Wednesday evening.
The sides had a limp start to the encounter, however they turned over a new leaf in the second interval as they treated spectators to a seven goal thriller.
The turnaround for United is courtesy of the introduction of Thuso Phala, who was brought on at the restart, and put his side ahead within a blink of an eye.
“I thought the second half was very good. In the first half we switched off a little bit. But I will take 5-2 any day of the week. I think we had a chance to score more goals. And in the finish I brought two of the kids on, we’ve got Aubrey Modiba, we’ve got Fagrie Lakay, Thabo Mnyamane, they are not pensioners … so we had a very young team on the field,” said Baxter after the match.
“To be brutally honest I thought that the first half was very mediocre for us. I wanted Mandla to start because he is fitter, but I think he has not played this way before and the few training that we had left him ill-equipped to get the team shape right. He was okay on the ball, he did nice things on the ball. Because of the lack of understanding of how we play, he didn’t really take part in our movement around the box.
“So I changed him not because he played bad. Thuso Phala came on, and I knew he could give me 45 minutes, that is why I changed him at half-time. We changed the way we pressed, we changed the way we supported our front players, and we compressed the game a lot more and we knew we could get a lot of transitions when they were trying to play-out.”
