Tinashe Nengomasha is no stranger to high profile games and playing under pressure is not new to him and being in a cup semifinal is a place he has been in before during his trophy-laden five and a half seasons with Chiefs. Going into this Saturday’s Telkom Knockout Cup game with a very tricky Bloemfontein Celtic team, coming off the back of a midweek defeat at the hands of Moroka Swallows in a league game, has placed added emphasis for Chiefs to be successful over the weekend. Tinashe believes the best place for Chiefs to begin would be by putting the midweek debacle behind them and starting again. Although he has stated that they should not dwell much on Wednesday’s result,they will be analyzing their results and will be going over them to ensure that they do not repeat their failings from the Moroka Swallows game.

One shot

With a 171 games in all competitions under his belt for Chiefs,Tinashe is best placed to know about the sudden death nature of cup matches, and is now solely concentrating his energy on getting into December’s final.

As he says “losing to Swallows in the league is hurtful to us, the thing is that we will get our chance at Swallows when we play them again in the second round of league action later this season. What we must understand is that Celtic in the 2007 Telkom Cup Semi final will not happen again, this is our only opportunity in the Telkom Cup for this year. We have gotten over Swallows and as a team have decided that we need to give a better collective showing and every guy needs to bring his best game on Saturday because there is no coming back if you lose you out here.

Celtic Pride Vs Amakhosi Guts

Tinashe would like nothing more than to get to his fourth final with Chiefs in this competition and that can only be achieved if Chiefs are willing to fight with all they have to stop Celtic who have been undergoing a revival with Khabo Zondo at their helm.

With both teams having dropped points in league matches recently,the cup provides them with the platform to get their large number of fans smiling again. Tinashe explains “we have fantastic fans and Celtic also have very noisy and colorful supporters. Neither team wants to disappoint their fans; I do believe that given the way the fans have stuck behind we owe them this trophy.

It has been a year since they have been able to wear their most out landish costumes and attended a cup final.

Easy does it

Chiefs will again be expecting a rough ride as they did in previous rounds of the competition against Moroka Swallows and SuperSport United and will be looking to be just as inspired and clinical as they were in those games on Saturday.

According to Tinashe there can be no repeat of Chiefs first half performance on Wednesday evening when The Amakhosi were on the back foot against Swallows. As he says, “we know that it is not an option for us to sit back and wait for Celtic to come at us instead it needs to be different we need to do as we did against Free State Stars and SuperSport in our previous two games. When we created the chance and stuck them away there is no chance that we can at any time during the semifinal allow Celtic to get the better of us in any situation and our aim is to control the game from start to finish”.