Faith in youth pays off for De SA
Roger De Sa has described Ajax Cape Town’s MTN8 victory as a triumph for development.
|||Port Elizabeth – Roger De Sa has described Ajax Cape Town’s MTN8 victory as a triumph for development and urged the rest of the country’s clubs to focus on younger players.
Speaking after his team dethroned Kaizer Chiefs as champions of the season-opening tournament with a 1-0 win on Saturday, the Ajax coach expressed pride at the fact that just about all his players were products of the club’s development programme.
“Anssi (Jakkola, the goalkeeper) is a foreigner and is 26 years old. But the rest are academy players from Ajax. All 10 starters in the outfield were boys that came out of the academy. That is probably a unique scenario all over the world to have a team win the cup with 10 players from the academy being on the pitch,” De Sa said.
“It is something to be proud of as a club and I’ve always said that if all the clubs did what Ajax do, I think our nation would be in a better state as far as footballers are concerned.”
Of course the fact that Ajax were able to outplay Chiefs the way they did had a lot to do with a brilliant tactical plan that saw the Urban Warriors “starve” the Amakhosi full-backs of the ball and put their defence under pressure throughout.
Ajax’s general application on the day also left De Sa beaming with pride.
“I thought we played really well,” he smiled “We controlled the game, especially in the first half and we were a little unfortunate not to go 1-0 up because I thought we dominated. In the second half they got stronger but we were still pretty good.
“Throughout the 90 minutes I was pretty confident of the way we played. We didn’t let them play, which was probably one of the things we did well. We defended well. As a unit we defended very well and that was important. Even though we played well when we had the ball, I thought defensively we were solid. We pressed them and we won the ball quickly and we kept most of the possession. It’s a good feeling when you play well and you win the game; its very rewarding.”
For him, in particular, the win was all the more special.
“Listen, for me it is very important to have won this because I was tired of collecting silver medals,” laughed the coach who had previously finished as runner-up in five of his six finals prior to this one.
The MTN8 captured, De Sa is now looking for more.
“It’s important to win one (a trophy) early in the season. Now that these young boys have got a taste of it, they’ve got a feel of it, they are going to want more. Their confidence will get a bit higher and hopefully we can build on from here.”
The key is to not get carried away though. - The Star