Cape Town - Mamelodi Sundowns co-coach Rhulani Mokwena played down the controversial decision to disallow his side’s injury-time goal against Angolan giants Pedro de Luanda in Saturday evening’s CAF Champions League quarter-final first-leg clash in Angola.
As a result of the disallowed goal, the visiting Sundowns suffered a 2-1 defeat and had to settle for the lone advantage of scoring an away goal.
Sundowns’ second-half substitute, attacking midfielder Neo Maema, scored a goal at the end, with a fine strike from outside the opposition penalty area. The strike had the hallmark of class as it ballooned over the defence, and then dipped just under the crossbar for what looked like a perfectly taken goal.
However, after the goal, the Zambian referee Janny Sikazwe approached the VAR (video assistant referee) apparatus and looked at the goalscoring strike a few times. Then for whatever reason, he decided to replay the movement that led to the goal and took play right back close to the halfway line. There he spotted a Sundowns foul on an opposition player and that's when he decided to disallow the goal. The ref would have seen the foul in real-time. Many would have to agree that the foul was so slight, that it didn’t warrant any action from the ref and certainly the Zambian official didn’t react at the time.
Mokwena was asked to comment on Sikazwe’s controversial decision, but he played it down.
“Look, I don't want to talk about the refereeing decisions,” said Mokwena. “We have VAR today and if there was any lack of clarity about the incident, I am sure VAR would have brought the incident back to be reviewed. It would have given a directive to the match officials.”
Mokwena was gracious in defeat and said that the Angolans were the better side in the first half. He was confident Sundowns will turn the tables when the Angolans visit Johannesburg next week.
“We came here to try to win and we were disappointed in the first half,” said Mokwena. “We were lacking aggression and lacked focus.
“We play every match to win. We showed that we were much better in the second half than our first-half performance. We created more goal opportunities and had more final-third entries.
“We controlled the game a bit more. We dominated the field a little bit more, and we pressed the line a bit higher.”
Sundowns will host the Angolans in the second leg at the FNB Stadium on Saturday.
@Herman_Gibbs