The way a player feels and acts the day before a Cup final can also be used as a precursor to judge the way things will pan out for him during the game. As Chiefs take a step closer to their SAA Supa8 Cup Final appearance on Saturday evening.

One of the wise old heads Ernst Middendorp will be looking towards; to steady the ship in Saturday’s final against SuperSport will be defender Patrick Mayo. The vastly experienced and highly versatile Mayo was Chiefs man of the tournament when The Amakhosi reigned supreme in the ABSA Cup recently. With a Cup final against his old team SuperSport on the horizon, a clearly relaxed looking an upbeat Mayo took time out of his schedule, to sit down with kaizerchiefs.com on Friday morning.

KC.COM: Patrick the last Cup Final you played for Chiefs in Durban, you walked home with a winner’s medal. Looking for the same kind of outcome on Saturday?

PM: Most definitely I do believe that we can return home with the same kind of result that we did against Pirates in May, when we won the ABSA Cup. The team has been playing well recently and we have also trained hard over the week and have done our home work on SuperSport United. There is no question about the fact that we want to win the game and being second best is not in our vocabulary.

KC.COM: Pitso Mosimane has been writing his team off ahead of the final, you know him well enough as he was once your coach at SuperSport. What do you make of all the things he said relating to the SAA Supa8 Final in the media?

PM: The first thing is that he always loves beating the so called big three teams, which is us Sundowns and Orlando Pirates his claim to fame usually is on the way he prepares his team prior to tackling one of these teams. He thrives on playing the big games and more so Chiefs than any of the others, for him to say that he is not excited by the final is really just a lie. He knows that should the result go against him he won’t be able to live with it; the thing is we not worried about him, if he is saying that the SAA Supa8 Trophy does not mean much to him, that’s fine because for us winning it will mean a lot.

KC.COM: SuperSport have lost a number of key players to other teams over the past few months, they will also be with out Tony Tzabedze for the final as he is suspended. Do you feel that they are still as dangerous a team as they were with Calvin Marlin, Lungisani Ndlela and Abram Raselemane?

PM: They have made it all the way to the final with out those guys; teams like SuperSport get revved by just hearing that they going to be playing against us, they do have a number of good nippy young guys. Obviously they are trying to over come the loss of those guys; they do possess the likes of Daine Klate who is one of the new generation of SuperSport players. Tsabedze has been a leading figure in their run to the Cup final remember he scored right at the end against Pirates and took the game to a penalty shoot out which they eventually won. Although they might miss Tsabedze’s presence they still do have an adequate number of replacements for him.

KC.COM: There has for a while now been much talk about who the real Cup Kings of South African Football are, between Kaizer Chiefs and SuperSport United. What is your opinion on the matter?

PM: If you must ask that question if one goes back over the previous two seasons, SuperSport have been in five (excluding this weekends game) Cup finals, of which they have won just two. This means that they have a 40% win ratio in Cup Finals over two seasons. We have been to three Cup finals in this times and won two of them which gives us a success rate in Cup Finals of 66%. Added to that we have also been league champions which means that we have won more titles them, I think that getting to a final is the first part, possessing the right amount of Big Match Temperament to win it is a different issue.

KC.COM: Do you feel that you and your team mates have the BMT to bring home the trophy on Saturday evening?

PM: I do not want to sound arrogant or anything like that, the real issue is that if you see our record in Cup Finals over the years, in the past six years Chiefs have in official domestic cup competition played in eight Cup Finals and won six of them. That statistic does go along way towards showing that we love playing in Cup Finals, and more than that we love winning them; victory does come with a big win bonus as well.

KC.COM: Since you joined Chiefs at the start of the 2003 – 2004 season, the Supa8 trophy is the only domestic title you have not yet won. Is that extra motivation for you going into tomorrow’s game?

PM: I don’t think just for me I do feel that all the guys want to win tomorrow and half the current squad was around when we lost to SuperSport in the Supa8 Final two years ago, so from that point of view we all want to win the game. When it comes to me personally, I do think that it would be nice to have winner’s medals of all the local domestic competitions in my trophy cabinet when I eventually call it a day from soccer.