We are midway through our final working week of the year and have been hard at work preparing for our game against Black Leopards in Thoyandou, which will be our final match of 2005. One of the most difficult times to face a team is when they have had a bad result or two, with Black Leopards losing at the weekend 5-1 to Sundowns, we are sure to face a back lash.

They will want to erase the Sundowns result from their memories by beating us this will surely erase those painful memories for them. Having said that we have won a hat trick of games and will like to continue with that run which has been our best of the season so far. We are playing a good and exciting brand of soccer and the important thing at the moment is that we are creating goals and taking our opportunities and getting the right kind of results.

Going through December unbeaten is the first objective the second is to narrow the gap on both Sundowns and Pirates at the top of the table. Pirates might have lost against Swallows; although it is a result that benefits us we cannot be celebrating Pirates and Sundowns misfortune. We have to do our own work and get the results that count for us, we cannot be expecting other teams to do us favors all the time we need to win games and ease the pressure on ourselves.

Although we laboured hard this week it was difficult to get the players to kill themselves on the training ground, the first reason for this being that the entire country is on holiday and it affects us as well. While you need to be up at 7h00 am and head for the training ground the rest of your family and friends are sleeping or heading to the beach as most people are out of town on their summer holidays.

As soccer players we do realize that we need to make certain sacrifices, with the Africa Cup of Nations in January we had to play more games than we would usually played.

Taking in Thursday’s game against Leopards plus the various cup matches that we have played in by the end of this week we would have played twenty-three league and cup matches since the start of August. Translated this means we have played 23 games in five months, added with the travelling to away games and when we played matches in Rustenburg it has been a tiring few months for the players.

We do have an extended break because of the Nations Cup and our players will officially be off from the 23rd of December to the 10th January, without any competitive games we will keep fit by arranging a number of friendly games. Our first competitive game of 2006 will only be on the 18th of February against Dynamos, it is ironic that we begin the second half of the new season with a game against a team from the Limpopo province as we close off the year with a game against a team from the same area.

Myself along with my assistant Frank Eullberg will be departing for Germany on Friday, which will be my first trip home since I joined Chiefs in July, I will be happy to spend some quality time at home over Christmas with my family. We will talk again on Friday after our game against Black Leopards and we will look back at my first six months with Chiefs.

Love and Peace!

Ernst Middendorp


Kaizer Chiefs Head Coach