Durban - Kaizer Chiefs Head Coach Arthur Zwane has labelled his side's thumping at the hands of AmaZulu on Friday as a hard lesson learned for him and his boys.
Amakhosi suffered their second successive league defeat and a fifth for the season after being on the wrong end of a 4-0 annihilation at the Moses Mabhida Stadium.
The Naturena-based side also extended the unwanted record of failing to beat Usuthu at the seventh attempt, their last victory over AmaZulu coming in 2021.
Coach Zwane, who saw his side fail to score a goal for the sixth time this campaign, identified key individual errors defensively and a failure to convert chances at the right moments as the main reason for his side's downfall on the night.
"I think this one game where we'll have to take a hard lesson, I think if you look at the performance last week and this week, the performance was the same but with just a different scoreline," he told members of the media
👀 "The performance wasn't that bad, we were in control of the game."
— SuperSport Football ⚽️ (@SSFootball) January 13, 2023
Chiefs coach Arthur Zwane on tonight's 4-0 loss to AmaZulu in the #DStvPrem. pic.twitter.com/7nQw3h2V1A
"We conceded two goals in a similar manner where I think we could've done better."
"And then you look at goal-scoring chances, we had one half-chance and a clear-cut chance before we got the penalty and we couldn't take any of those so for us it was just a bad day at the office, just one of those days."
The 49-year-old Zwane fielded Samkelo Zwane, Nkosingiphile Ngcobo, and Yusuf Maart in midfield, a fairly young group in comparison to AmaZulu's George Maluleka, Makhehleni Makhaula, and Pule Ekstein.
3-0 to AmaZulu before half-time!
— SuperSport Football ⚽️ (@SSFootball) January 13, 2023
Khune won't want to see this again 🙃 pic.twitter.com/vlZ6XGKwt4
Chiefs struggled to turn their patient build-ups and pressure in possession into good chances.
AmaZulu go 2-0 up against Chiefs!
— SuperSport Football ⚽️ (@SSFootball) January 13, 2023
It's identical to the first goal from the corner spot 👀 pic.twitter.com/jdkNhBYuDY
10111 refused to attribute his team's lacklustre possession-based probes and bluntness in the final third to a lack of experience in midfield against one of the league's most formidable teams, stating that he felt those individuals played well.
"You look at Mshini (Ngcobo) and Zwane as well. They both had good games in my opinion and one of the opposition players admitted that they weren't better than our players today but we just made mistakes that were costly on the day and if you look at their goals, they didn't come at the result of the midfielders being better than us."
@SmisoScribe