Sundowns gallop to victory

2005-12-17 18:52

Pretoria - Mamelodi Sundowns stuttered, cantered and finally galloped to a 5-1 victory over Black Leopards in their Premiership encounter played at the HM Pitje Stadium on Saturday afternoon.

Sundowns, ever the authors of their erratic form lately, courageously clawed themselves back from an early Leopards goal scored in the opening exchanges by Rudzani Ramundzuli.

In all fairness, Leopards hardly deserved the goal as it came off an amateurish error from the ageing Sundowns Venezuelan international goalkeeper Rafael Dudamel.

Dudamel failed to clear the ball from a chested Peter Ndlovu pass and Ramundzuli opportunistically pounced on a clearly surprised Dudamel to score the opener in the sixth minute.

However the expensively assembled Sundowns outfit kept their nerve and slowly forged back to gain a degree of ascendancy over their Limpopo counterparts.

However Sundowns just did not consider Leopards to be a team that deserved to gain a point from this encounter and with dominance in the middle of the park, they surged forward with purpose.

Surprise Moriri was at the heart of a spirited Sundowns attack with a well-struck low pile driver from an acute angle that levelled the scores in the 19th minute.

Ten minutes later a clearly revitalized Sundowns unit took the lead when the lanky Sandile Ndlovu blasted the ball into an open net after Clement Mazibuko's initial shot at goal rebounded off the woodwork.

With a fury rarely seen

Sundowns came out firing in the second half and engulfed Leopards with a fury rarely seen from the Pretoria outfit this season.

In the 79th minute Moriri, again the instigator perfectly curled a free kick on the edge of the Leopards box, beating the Leopards wall and finally the goalkeeper Guy Mutshi to extend the hosts lead to 3-1.

And like a pack of possessed hyenas Sundowns went for the jugular in the dying moments and their enduring persistence paid dividends as Jose Torrealba scored a sitter in the 84th minute with Manqoba Ngwenya driving in the final nail with a superb strike two minutes later.

It was an overwhelming second half display by Sundowns, clearly a much closer unit after the departure of their coach Angel Cappa during the course of the week.

- SAPA