It has been a frantic week to say the least, the few days that we had off over the festive break have whizzed right past me and with the holidays out of the way it is time for us to get down to work again. After our match against Santos last Wednesday I headed back to Germany for a few days and was back in Johannesburg on Boxing Day, over the past couple of days I have been doing planning and preparation work ahead of our resumption of training on Friday afternoon.

The break although a short one has had its benefits and I think the timing of which has been spot on, it came at a time when we had played four games close to each other and I feel the guys needed some time off.

The time away has not been so long that we will be need to start working on areas such as physical fitness, they have been away for just a couple of days so the first aspect we will need to work on is getting them to focus on the fact that they are now back at work.

I do understand that a number of the players especially the foreign guys will have seen their families after a long time, so we will use Friday to get every one's focus back onto matters at hand.

Given the fact that the guys had just about a week off, it means that when we resume training on Friday, we will be in the fortunate position of being able to carry on from where we left off last Tuesday, which effectively means that instead of having to do a lot of physical or conditioning work, we can continue with our tactical and technical programme.

Over the weekend we will step up our training as we prepare for our first game back, which is against SuperSport United in the evening of the 6th January at Loftus in Tshwane (Pretoria).

Along with the SuperSport game, we have four other potentially title deciding games in January which sees us up against Silver Stars, Benoni Premier United, Jomo Cosmos and Ajax Cape Town.

The five games we play in January are against teams apart from Silver Stars that we drew against in the opening round of league games, this time around we need to change that as we once again set out to emerge from January with five wins. It will not be easy but we will take it one game at a time and will treat each game with the importance it deserves, we need to take the initiative first up and win our matches before we can rely on results elsewhere going our way.

Resuming the fixtures next week and being able to prepare for SuperSport with a full team available for selection is always and advantage, the fact that we do not have any suspensions to is another plus factor in our preparations. What it effectively means is that we can have some continuity, which helps us to keep our ryhtme, from the past couple of games going.

On the injury front we did have Rotson Kilambe unavailable for the Maritzburg United and Santos games, as we was tending to a knee problem he was given a special training programme to work with during the break period. We will again assess him on Friday, from the information that I do have at the present time I believe that he has substantially recovered from the injury.

Another of our long term injury concerns Derrick Spencer will begin training with the rest of the team on Friday, as he will begin by taking part in a number of limited training routines with the other guys. Even though it will still be a while before he can play matches training with the rest of the team will help Derrick keep in touch with the rest of the team.

Till next week be well and to all of you out there enjoy what remains of your holidays, be well over the weekend and enjoy your new year celebrations. I hope to see you all back and healthy in the New Year, don’t forget about next Saturday’s game against SuperSport United. Speak to you again in 2007.

Your Coach

Ernst Middendorp