You have heard about the injury situation in our camp. Well, just to give you more information around this. Siyabonga Nkosi started training with us as a team on Thursday morning. He is looking good from what we have observed in the two training sessions but he is still a little bit careful, and that is normal.

There is a good chance he could be back when we play Celtic next Wednesday. But if we have other options for our starting eleven, then we will have to take it easy with Siyabonga.

With Gert Schalkwyk - he’s been in and out for the last 10 or 14 days and it has been the same situation as Siyabonga. We must also have a look to see what it going on there. Thabo Mooki is down with flu and we gave him a week off. He will return to training on Monday.

Derrick Spencer underwent an operation on Wednesday morning and he should be out for about six weeks. We are not going to rush him back into action and even if we have to wait until the beginning of 2007, that will be fine.

Emile Baron was on the way to recovery and we even thought he could start playing in the middle of November. But he suffered a back injury at training and he will be out for some time. It’s not a serious injury and he should start moving next week Monday. That is the situation with injuries and all other guys are fine.

We didn’t have any matches these weeks and our training programme was geared towards our next match against Celtic. We are aware of the significance of this match in our title race and we will approach it like a cup final.

Our focus has been around final combinations and looking for standards for free-kicks and so forth and we will continue to do that two to three days before the match.

As far as the team is concerned, there’s no need to have a lot of changes. We don’t have any issues concerning third yellow cards or injuries. We will have a chance to watch Bloemfontein Celtic this evening (Friday) when they play Bidvest Wits.

Sure we haven’t had any competitive matches since our game against Wits in the Telkom Knockout but we are not complaining. We have discussed this situation and agreed that it actually suits us just fine. We played a lot of matches in the pre-season and the beginning of the season. We will get to a point where we will be playing on a Wednesday, Saturday or Sunday and so we are afforded the opportunity of a valuable respite.

You might also wonder what our coaches do when the team is not playing. Well, there’s a lot of work to be done. As I mentioned, this evening we have to watch Celtic, after that our next opponent is Black Leopards and I am even thinking of going to Venda to watch them live against SuperSport and not watch on TV.

On Sunday, there’s Moroka Swallows to watch against Benoni United in a cup match. And as you can see there isn’t any time to relax because immediately after that we are back at training on Monday. But of course we will give the players a day off on Sunday to relax and spend some time with their families.

Love and Peace!

Ernst Middendorp


Kaizer Chiefs Head Coach