“It was a difficult game to put into a category. We were sitting with two situations; it was a full house and a high profile game. You can fall into a trap of winning this one at all cost and put too much emphasis on winning. As we have said before that it was all about winning and development. At some point in the game we thought to bring George Lebese on, but that would have been adding experience and not learn anything.

We brought the youth on, Philane (Cele) came on and showed what he could do, Matombo (Chris) and the other players from Development also came on to have a feel of the first team action. At the end of the day we said no, we lost on a set play and created a lot of chances. Tower (Mathoho), Mandla (Masango) and Josta (Dladla) got a good game under their legs and that for me was a good exercise. We had to sacrifice something, and if there was something to sacrifice, it was winning, for the sake of development,” said the Chiefs Mentor.

About the many chances the team had created in this game and in the past, Baxter said; “The chances to goal ratio must go up. We have talked about it today in training. We can’t create seven chances and score one goal. Statistically the average must be four chances to one goal, that’s usual and that’s normal.”

Baxter was upbeat about the way forward following the results in Bloemfontein; “A win could have been a dot over the ‘I’ but even though we didn’t get the win, we got a lot of positives. It is important when we talk about the development and the changes we are making, to test that. This was a litmus test to say, are there any players coming through? Now we see that a couple of players we picked are coming through. Six months ago if I had put Matombo in, it would have been too much for him. We spoke about Lorenzo (Gordhino) and Simphiwe (Mtsweni) before, now if you bring Lorenzo on; he does the same job as Tower or Ivan.

Ivan did better than I thought he would do. I didn’t think he would understand our play so fast. In general he did well, he was composed, his heading was good and his positioning was superb. I would like to see him playing with a bit more tempo. He asked me after the game and I told him that.

We rested four to five players because they had a heavy schedule (Tefu Mashamaite, Knowledge Musona, Willard Katsande and Morgan Gould); National players (Itumeleng Khune, Reneilwe Letsholanyane, Bernard Parker and Tsepo Masilela) had a game on weekend, that’s ok and some of the players just returned from injuries (Siphiwe Tshabalala, Kaizer JNR, Pa Gaxa and Lehlohonolo Majoro).

This game gave us a chance to bring the whole squad to the same level. After all it was an entertaining game. The pitch was bad but the players did everything to give the fans their money’s worth. I think the supporters would have liked to see a win, but at least they saw the players from development. The game had no sense of a friendly, both teams wanted to win. Chiefs fans want to see commitment and that’s what the players gave on the day.