Orlando Pirates assistant coach Sergio Almenara has responded to Mamelodi Sundowns head coach Rulani Mokwena's claim that they always lose a player "with a very severe injury" when they play against the Buccaneers.
Ahead of Sundowns and Pirates' MTN8 final on Saturday, Mokwena said that he hopes there won't be "tackles that are over the top" because previously they lost players to long-term injuries like former midfielder Haashim Domingo against Pirates in the Carling Black Label Cup pre-season game and also attributed the injury of Abubaker Nasir to the Buccaneers' physicality after the Ethiopian got injured against Jose Riveiro's charges last season and said it is the reason why they still don't have Nasir available.
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Mokwena also highlighted that "Nkosinathi Sibisi took Marcelo Allende out with a two-footed studs up challenge on the half-way line" in their previous league clash and said that Allende has not recovered from that tackle.
Almenara responded to the 36-year old's accusations and suggested that Sundowns are actually the ones with an unusually high number of fouls against them for a team that plays possession-based football.
"The data says the last time we played against Sundowns they committed 24 fouls and Pirates committed six," Almenara said in a press conference.
"The data also says that Sundowns' average fouls per game is almost 17, in the top two, in both competitions, PSL and MTN8 and in a possession-based team, you should calculate how much time they are out of possession, divided by the number of fouls they are committing.
"We're talking about things that can happen in a particular game but some things can't happen in many of their games," he said.
The Brazilians senior coach Manqoba Mngqithi, who was sitting next to the Spanish coach in a pre-match press conference, also had his say on the matter and suggested that their fouls are tactical fouls and that they do not harm anyone with those fouls.
"The coach (Almenara) is saying we're averaging quite a lot of fouls per match but to be honest I'm not surprised, we're playing a very high octane game and most of those fouls are maybe from counter presses," Mngqithi said.
"We have not really harmed any opposition with those fouls, those are the fouls to make sure we don't lose the balance in transition and that we're in a better shape to be able to deal with a counter-attack.
"It's not fouls that you can write home and say we nearly broke someone's (leg). The truth of the matter is the nature of the type of game we play requires that we must do what we have to do to make sure that we're not exposed on counter-attacks," he explained.
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