Mamelodi Sundowns chairman Tlhopie Motsepe has revealed why the Betway Premiership club decided to part ways with Manqoba Mngqithi.
This week, the Brazilians dismissed Mngqithi and appointed former Esperance coach Miguel Cardoso as his replacement.
Although Sundowns currently lead the league standings with only one league defeat this season, setbacks in cup competitions led to Mngqithi’s departure. The team lost to Magesi in the Carling Knockout Cup final and were eliminated by Stellenbosch in the MTN8 semi-finals.
Additionally, their CAF Champions League campaign started sluggishly, with back-to-back draws against Maniema Union and AS FAR.
Motsepe said in the Citizen: “There are always considerations in serious appointments like changing a coach but it wasn’t the Magesi FC game that was the decider. The Magesi game was magic for most but tragic for us. It was definitely something you look back on.
“Someone came up to me at the end of the game and said this is why football is called the beautiful game and it’s tough to look at it from that perspective when you’re on the receiving end of a Cinderella story like that. What I know is that the performance inspired many amateur footballers and many coaches to say that this is possible and that’s the magic of cup football.
“We started the season having given the coaching team an opportunity to lead the club in the direction they saw fit. Unfortunately, we started with a stumble and we were knocked out of the MTN8. We had another unfortunate stumble against Polokwane City and there was just series of games where we never really saw the consistency that we would have hoped.
“The club was trending in the direction that we knew the club should be so the decision was made after a compounding of many factors and led us to the decision and then we had to make it fairly quick to put the coach and his team to be in the best position to see out the rest of the season.”