If anyone had said back in November that, come the end of the year, we would be in second spot in the league standings, I am sure that he would have received a number of frowns and people would have thought he was not well.

Thanks to a team made up of dedicated and ambitious players, this has been achieved and after our loss to Bloemfontein Celtic on the 6th November we needed to turn things around.

We had a serious introspection and from that point onwards, our season took a turn for the better. A lot of credit must go to the players as well as the technical and back room staff as everyone rallied around to ensure that we had a change in fortunes. And thank the All Mighty as we managed to climb ten places in the league from, at one time, being in twelfth spot, we are now a point behind Silver Stars in second place.

All of this only happened because of a great allround team effort from all the players, as we saw in our last two games that the guys are committed towards putting themselves in the kind of position where we are confident enough to make a dash for the top spot in the league.

Of our game against Santos, I feel that it was a much tougher and more open game, than our previous game against Maritzburg United and we were expecting that.

Santos attacked us from the start and put their game plan into good effect early on. Siyabonga Nkosi was kept under the watchful gaze of Robert Nauseb for the first twenty odd minutes, it took him time to adapt to being tightly marked.

He was able to shrug off the attention he was getting from Nauseb as the half progressed. He really came into his own, thinking quick in both instances; firstly in getting the ball in rapid time to Shaun for our first goal.

Siyabonga reacted quickly when he found himself in space and struck the ball first time to give us the lead and his goal came at a very important time as Santos had just equalized a minute before that.

Over all I do feel that we should have scored more goals against Santos and we allowed them too much space, especially on the left wing as that is where both their goals came from.

There is much space for us to improve, we have laid the foundations for what can be a very successful season and we need to work on some parts of our defence when we return next week we will address these issues.

A lot of compliments also need to be dished out to many of the guys who have improved in leaps and bounds over the past couple of matches.

Kaizer Junior has really come into his own, scoring a number of goals including his hat trick against Maritzburg United and for Kaizer playing along side an experienced striker like Shaun Bartlett, has also helped him in his development.

After having a number of problems in the striking positions last season, it is a welcome relief to see that in addition to Shaun and Kaizer we have Serge Djiehoua and Louis Agyemang battling it out to be the back up striker.

We have a short break and will be back at training on the 27th December, I believe that in the history of the PSL this years mid season break is one of the shortest, which means that the players have very little time off over the holiday period.

January 2007 is going to be a tough month for us with 5 matches and I cannot stress how important it is for us to win these games. Our aim, once again, during these games will be to get the maximum number of points and keep up the pressure on the log leaders.

For now that is all, although I will write my column again one more time for 2006 next week when we return to training. To all our fans take care over the holidays and do not forget we have an important game against SuperSport United on the 6th January.