I will begin today by commending the team on their performance against Silver Stars on Wednesday evening; it was a better all round effort than the one we put up against SuperSport last Saturday. Although we did put up a better display against Stars, we still failed to capitalize on the opportunities that fell our way, a number of players were unfortunate not to have found the back of the net for us after finding themselves in good goal scoring positions.

The Silver Stars game demonstrated that despite having a number of players out of action due to injury and suspensions, we do have a lot of strength in depth and under the circumstances were able to field a strong team.

This Sunday we have Benoni United visiting us and I cannot stress how important it is for us to win the game, although results in other league matches have been going our way recently. We need to start winning games and not be too dependent on results elsewhere working out for us, I have made this point before and I will say it repeatedly we need to be as close as possible at all times to the league leaders. Benoni United have lost their last three games that can be both good and bad for us, good in a sense that they have had a dip in form and we can take advantage of that fact.

I am aware that they conceded a number of goals in recent games and we should we take our chances early on, we could make life difficult for them. We need to guard against being wasteful up front against Benoni United as we were during Wednesday evening’s game against Silver Stars.

On the other side playing against a team who have gone through a bad patch could work against you, as Benoni like most teams do not need much motivating when it comes to playing against the likes of Chiefs.

As we saw earlier in the season when we played against them, that they did not stand on ceremony and really made a game of it. So we cannot read much into their recent form and base much on that, this is a different game for them and us I do feel that we will be able to get our first win of 2007 on Sunday.

With regards to our team news ahead of Sunday’s game, the first issue to address will be the fact that we got news this week from the doctors that Shaun Bartlett will be out of match action for around about six weeks. Shaun injured himself during the loss to SuperSport, we cannot hide from the fact and admit that he has been one of our key players recently and being without him for such a long period is not an ideal situation to be in.

We also have question marks over the availability for the Benoni United game over Fabian McCarthy who is nursing a calf strain, there is also Thabo Mooki and Ditheko Mototo recovering from an ankle and knee problems respectively.

A final piece of team news from this week is that we have acquired the services of Siphiwe Tshabalala formerly of Free State Stars; Siphiwe has been a target of ours for quiet some time. He is a very talented player and has the experience of having campaigned with the national team throughout Africa; he was also part of the Bafana Bafana team that participated in the last Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt last year.

In all likelihood Siphiwe will not play this weekend as he has not had much time to train with the rest of the team, we will give him the opportunity to acclimatize and will take it from there.

For the moment that is all, hope to see you all on Sunday.

Ernst Middendorp