Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler reveals that he told his players that the clash against Mamelodi Sundowns was a "freebie".
The Citizens' CAF Champions League hopes suffered a blow after drawing 0-0 with the newly crowned DStv Premiership champions on Tuesday evening.
The Mother City side did play the final 15 minutes with ten men after Brice Ambina's sending off, but Tinkler was a little discouraged that his side did not play without a fear.
Read: Downs' Impressive Home Record Halted By 10-Man CT City
"In terms of our wingers today Thami and Darwin, you know we were hoping that their full-backs would play a lot deeper but they didn't and actually pushed on high," Tinkler told SuperSport after the game.
"So, we needed to utilise the space in behind them a little bit better and we spoke about that at halftime. We created one or two chances but so did they in that first half.
"And in the second half, once I made that change with Ambina because they were overloading that middle of the park with Maema, Mokena and Allende, you know.
"We needed to fix that and Ambina came in and I thought we dealt with that a lot better but then once he got the red card.
"That obviously put us on the back-foot and we now had to obviously look to play on the counter and hold out as much as we possibly could so brave performance, hard-working performance from the team.
"You know, today I called that a freebie to the players. I said you need to use this as a freebie, nobody cares you know because they are all expecting that you going to lose today.
"So go out there and express yourselves and play without fear, but I still felt that we didn't do that. We could've done it a little bit better," Tinkler said.
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