Amakhosi goalkeeper Itumeleng Khune is looking forward with relish to Chiefs’ Absa Premiership clash this coming Sunday afternoon against fellow title chasers Mamelodi Sundowns at the Loftus Stadium in Tshwane / Pretoria.

According to Khune the stakes could not be higher for Chiefs as they enter the business end of the league race, with three games to go in the season a win against Sundowns is essential.

“Basically for there are 270 minutes ahead of us that can define us and can also be the difference between our seasons ending off with the title or not.

Whatever has happened to us in the season thus far the disappointments and the victory’s is water under the bridge, what happens from here on in counts.”

Khune who has kept a clean sheet in his last two league outings for the Amakhosi during back to back 2-0 successes’ against SuperSport United and Mpumalanga Black Aces, believes those two wins and Chiefs recent league form in their last three outings including a 1-1 draw against BIDVest Wits helped put them firmly back in the title race, and would not want to undo that with a below par performance on Sunday.

“We have worked well as a team in of late in our league games and we need to work for each other game and hopefully that will help us to get the results we are looking for.

We have a strong will and we have done the hard work by getting to within touching distance of the leaders and now that we are so close it is essential that we keep up the pressure on the two teams ahead of us by winning against another title chaser Sundowns.”

Khune is also well aware that Sundowns who themselves harbor title ambitions of their own will be no easy pickings on Sunday afternoon, “in recent games Sundowns have been very good, scoring a lot of goals and we seen their ability to fight back when they were trailing Ajax 4-1 recently and came back to finish at 4-4.

It is going to be a challenging game, we are motivated for the game and I feel that with both teams on good form it will be a good tough physical battle.”

Each of Chiefs remaining three league games are must win affairs for them Khune is hopeful that results elsewhere will work out favourably for them as long as they keep on winning their matches.

“We need to keep up our end of the deal, basically we can decide how long we stay in the race because we have matches against Sundowns and Ajax, we will give it our all to win these matches and hopefully Pirates can drop points. That’s the equation and the formula is win, win, win.”