Full round of midweek Betway Premiership matches

Defending Betway Premiership champions, Orlando Pirates, will want to maintain their lead at the top of the log early in the season. Pirates will host a stubborn Sekhukhune United at the Orlando stadium in Soweto on Tuesday. This will be the second meeting between the two sides in a matter of days.

The Buccaneers beat Sekhukhune in an MTN8 first leg semi-final clash away from home on Saturday.

Pirates’ supporters will be happy to see their new Norwegian striker, Sebastian Pedersen, in action at their home ground. Pedersen, who was signed during the off season, made his much-awaited debut for the Buccaneers on Saturday.

The 27-year-old was introduced midway through the second half in their narrow 1-nil win over Sekhukhune United in Polokwane. Pirates coach, Abdeslam Ouaddou, is confident that Pedersen is the solution to their goal scoring issues.

“He’s the man that the scouting department have seen maybe to help us at the moment. I think he’s really happy to join Pirates, we saw a look of excitement and a lot of happiness from him at training. we can see that deefinitely hee’s got qualities to finish, i don’t need one month to see that he’s a finisher.” says Ouaddou.

After the league clash midweek, the two teams will play each other again in the second leg of the MTN-8 semi-final in Orlando. Sekhukhune coach, Cedric Kaze says they need to plan carefully for the remaining two matches against the Buccaneers.

“It’s a very big week for us playing the same team three times, sometimes you play twice maybe the fans of football got a bonus as well. three times in one week it’s very important as well to manage well the three games.”

After their first loss at home in a while, Mamelodi Sundowns will want to return to winning ways when they visit another KwaZulu-Natal side, Amazulu FC.

Coach Miguel Cardoso says the match against Usuthu is an opportunity to correct the wrongs after the 1-nil defeat to Golden Arrows in Atteridgeville.

“Let’s see how we are going to go there but now we have to figure out what we have in the middle of the week because this team didn’t play when we played and they are going to rest now to receive us, and we still have match to play so let’s see let’s prepare for AmaZulu and think about Golden Arrows again.”

Arrows coach, Pitso Dladla, says facing Sundowns three weekends in a row, is a mountain to climb.

Sundowns travel to Durban this coming weekend for the MTN-8 second leg clash, before visiting Abafana Bes’thende in KZN next weekend.

“We did pretty well but there are areas we should have improved but look it’s not easy to divulge everything we playing Sundowns three weekends consecutively but we needed to find a little bit of balance when we were in possession but defensively, we did well although in the second half we defended too deep inside our box that looked scarry but the concentration levels were very high. We will plan accordingly remember there’s a midweek game; we are playing a league game against Stellenbosch.