Another weekend has passed us by and another game has gone whereby we have not been able to take anything out of it. Once again it was disappointing losing a match and falling further far behind in the title race.

It has, and I think it will continue, to be a very peculiar title race. For example; had we been successful on Saturday we could have snuck back up to first place on the table.

Due to the fact that a number of other teams had lost including Ajax Cape Town - having said that, I must concede that it will be very difficult for us to win the league from this point - we have played ourselves almost out of contention with our results over the past couple of weeks.

What is important now for us is to improve our game and concentrate on the ABSA Cup. I really do believe that we are not playing good football at the moment as we have demonstrated in our last couple of games as well as in the results that have come out of them.

Since the start of the New Year there have seen glimpses of the football that we produced during November and December, it is a really sad situation to see that we had been unable to continue on from where we had left off at the end of 2006.

Our ability to win just three out of our last seven league games really threw our plans into disarray and instead of being in a situation where we should have been looking forward to tightening the noose on the championship, we are instead virtually out of the title race and will need to go all out to finish as high up on the table as we possibly could.

Of overriding importance to us now will be the ABSA Cup and our aim, obviously, is to retain our title and hold on to it for another season and hopefully longer.

This past weekend’s game against Golden Arrows was a game whereby we never threatened the opposition at all and we lost concentration right at the end and were made to pay. It was hard to lose a game so late but that is football.

If you let down your guard you will pay and that is precisely what happened to us; we did not hold on to the ball much during the game. In addition, we were also unable to be creative enough to carve out openings and as a result, chances were few and far between for us.

This was really sad as we have in the past produced some good performances against Golden Arrows and I was hoping that we could have done that once more but unfortunately that was not to be the case.

Another factor that seems to have been our undoing is the fact that the team are under tremendous pressure and consequently they are unable to play their normal game. It was clearly evident on the players' faces and I could see that they were tense ahead of the game against Arrows; it does not do a team any favours if they have to play a game in such fear.

The scrutiny from the media and the general lambasting of the team by the public has added to make things worse. Nobody wants to lose a game and when they do, it would help if they had hands to lift them up.

It has been a very hard couple of weeks for the team and from my side I do not mind being criticized and all the rest of it. The way the players have been handled has not been good and it has made matters worse for us, but I do feel that we will grow stronger from this.

Up next we have a game against Wits at the weekend and we obviously want to be successful in that game. In order to keep up with our renewed objective, which is to finish as high up as possible, a win against Wits will give us a lift in many ways as the guys will be given a necessary confidence boost ahead of our ABSA Cup opener against Golden Arrows.

Ernst Middendorp