Once you have laid down the gauntlet, everyone seems ready to accept the challenge. With us having recently triumphed in a Cup Competition, all other comers will want to prove that it should have been them lifting the SAA Supa8 trophy instead of us.

Our Supa8 success is well and firmly behind us. In terms of the celebrations and the talk around winning our first official cup for the 2006 – 2007 season, we will take our heart warming and brave performances from the tournament forward with us as we aim to win more titles and cups in the next seven months of the current season.

We have a game this weekend against Bidvest Wits in the round of sixteen in the Telkom Knockout Cup on Saturday. We are all aware of the riches that come with winning this trophy but that is not the reason why would like to be successful in the competition. At the start of the season we did set our sights on fighting to the bitter end in as many of the competitions on offer in the PSL. We have been successful in the first of the domestic competitions that we contested, by winning the Supa8 and will now be looking towards overcoming Wits on Saturday and going into the quaterfinals of the Telkom Cup.

Our preparations for this game began on Tuesday and we trained twice on the day Wednesday and Thursday saw much of the same; and a further session on Friday which was centred around Saturday’s game. A lot of talk surrounding the game has been about the kick-off time which was scheduled for mid afternoon on Saturday, with the current heat wave being experienced in Johannesburg, the game was delayed by a half an hour.

We had looked at the issue of the heat and therefore we trained at the originally prescribed kick-off time during the week. The players had coped admirably well with the training, given the fact that the temperatures were in the early to mid 30 °C. I do feel that it is a good thing that the game has been postponed by half an hour.

If you look at the sun as I have, it has been at its harshest from around midday till around 16h00. Things began to cool down slightly thereafter so although for some time in the first half the weather might be unbearable. I have also had a look at the weather forecast for Saturday and it does look as though things might be a bit cooler during the match time.

The information I do have on the weather is that there will be a lot of cloud cover about with a 40% chance of rain, if this should hold then climatic conditions should not really be a problem.

Generally we have not had many injury problems to deal with this week as we still have the same casualties that we had a week ago, Siyabonga Nkosi is still unavailable as he is a long-term casualty. Derrick Spencer as well remains on the injury list, although we will see how things pan out with him over Friday night and into Saturday morning, for the rest of it we will be unchanged.

Wits have proved to us once before that they can be a handful if we take them for granted and give them the space to move, for us the equation is simple: we need our back four to be as stable and efficient as they were through our last four games. Not just the back four but Rowen Fernandez as well and I like to think of them as a back five.

I have also made our midfielders aware that we need to be dominant in matches from the start, not by waiting till the second half before we start finding our rhythm. I think a criticism of us in the league loss to Wits could be that we only came alive in the second half; we have worked on this part of our game and we also need to bury any half chance that comes our way.

Our aim is to be dominant in the game from start to finish and not let the opposition dictate the play to us.

Till Monday, keep well and keep up the support. Get to the stadium early on Saturday and remember that we can go forward together to the quarterfinals of the Telkom Knockout Cup.

Ernst Middendorp