Ankadikely – Ilafy, Madagascar: South African visitors, Kaizer Chiefs have had the feel of the venue of Sunday’ Champions’ League clash with islanders USJF Ravinala and coach Ted Dumitru is upbeat about the game and about a positive outcome of the job the players have in their hands, writes Mputumi Putco Mafani in Madagascar.

Dumitru says second to poor hotel challenges the team had to overcome is the issue of the pitch at the Stade de Mahamasina in Antananarivo where the local side Uscafoot play El-Merich from Sudan on Saturday before his charges play their hosts on Sunday and if it rains, the situation might get more complicated with ball control, “Our marshal plan is to beat the first opponent, the pitch and there is very less we can do except to get the players mentally and psychologically ready to do that. I observed that when you make a long pass the ball changes direction five times before it reaches the next player if he is lucky to receive it. We have to take this as it is and convert it to our weaponry”, said an upbeat Dumitru.

“I am, however quite pleased with the sharpness of the players so far and their willingness to work regardless of the situation, and this may be just another way to intensify co-ordinated team effort”, he said.

Word is abuzz that the Sudan national squad, which is here on a similar assignment, also had hotel problems and the ‘ploy’ seems to be a strategy from the islanders to unsettle their visitors psychologically ahead of the weekend but the Amakhosi camp now makes a mockery of that situation emanating from the acceptance of the fact that it may not change much now. Dumitru’s charges are booked at the Le Suc de le Ruche hotel, an equivalence of the legendary Karos-Johannesburger Hotel in Joubert Park, on the borders of Hillbrow with a similar social life offering around the hotel, with streets trading that offers ‘meals on wheels’ and may be, ‘meals on heels’ too; not that there are no better hotels on the seaside exotic ends of the island. It is history well documented that the proverbial African solidarity in football does not exist.

The positive thing is that life goes on here on the island where the ‘haves’ live together with the ‘have-nots’ side by side in the same suburbs, and it proves that it may not totally be true that poverty gives birth to crime, particularly when the poor and jobless know how to get up and do something for themselves.

One more training session and it will be ‘all-systems-go’ for the South Africans here as there has been an injury-and-sickness free situation so far in the Amakhosi camp.

See you later.

MERCI!