Sundowns will take on La Passe from Seychelles at the Loftus Versveld Stadium. Both first-leg and second-leg will be played in South Africa since La Passe don’t have a stadium approved by CAF in Seychelles.
Masandawana have set their sights high for this campaign in the Champions League having been shockingly knocked out by Petro de Luanda of Angola.
Sundowns co-coach Rulani Mokwena says they have gathered as much information as they can about the opposition.
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Rulani Mokwena – Downs had to dig deep into researching
“We’ve already started trying to get as much information about the opposition as we possibly can, fortunately they played Volcan club in the previous round and we were able to get footage of that match,” Mokwena told Sundownsfc.co.za.
“They have quite a few interesting football players and a few interesting schemes from a tactical perspective. Already you can see a very direct team that has a lot of physicality because of the profile, they have some players that already play for the Seychelles National team, two Madagascans and very good players that represent the national teams.
“They’ve got two very good young players that were sent to train in Germany two years ago. They have the Aboudou [Affandi Aboudou and Assad Aboudou] twins, they are very good players also and show very good potential, and at the age of 18 years or 19 years old they also got invites to go and train in Germany. We are talking about a team that has some interesting players, like I’ve said some players we don’t know much about and we’ve had to dig deep .
“Their striker [Brandon] Fanchette is very explosive, very mobile and very quick to play with the space behind and presses very, very well. We’ve done our homework and again we will be playing with a team that plays with three center backs, wingbacks and we’ve got a responsibility to try to move the reinforced block. We will prepare and try as much as possible to give the players all the information about the plans and what to expect and hopefully we can be ready and get a very good result on Sunday leading up to the second leg on Friday.
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“It’s always tricky to play the same team twice and you see it even [playing] in the league. It’s never easy, the only advantage is probably that there’s less traveling for us and from that perspective then you’ve got a huge mental and physical advantage.
“There’s no accumulation of travel fatigue or psychological fatigue from traveling and being in a foreign country, but apart from that [we] still have to play the 90 minutes with the same attitude, and have a good mentality against a team that is well organized.” Said Coach Mokwena.
Sundowns clash with La Passe on Sunday at 16:00