We will be ready for Baroka - Maduka

New Bloemfontein Celtic head coach John Maduka feels that despite the challenges of the last few months in lockdown, his side will be ready for their Nedbank Cup semifinal against Baroka FC at the Orlando Stadium on Saturday afternoon.

Maduka has taken over sole possession of the reins at the club after co-coach Lehlohonolo Seema left for Chippa United, ad his first game in charge will be a huge cup semifinal.

Coach, you start with a massive Nedbank Cup semifinal on Saturday, how have your preparations gone?

Things so far have been going well, we have been working hard at training and we are looking forward to the Nedbank Cup. It is one cup that Celtic has never won before, so it is important we go all out to win. For us to win, we have to win first against Baroka, so now our focus is on them. We are looking forward to playing them, we know they are a good team, even though we haven’t seen them for four months now. That makes it tricky because we don’t k ow how they are going to approach the game. Us as a team, we have tried to make sure we plan and go and play according to our game-plan.

As you say, it is tough to plan when you have not seen Baroka play for so long …

It is a tricky game, we have not played any friendly matches, so we have to be cautious and smart. We will only see the players playing on that particular day, because at training we have only been doing match practise, but in that instance the players know each other very well. We have to adapt and adjust on the day of the game. We have to be very clever.

Do you expect a high tempo for Saturday’s game?

In Europe you have seen that most of the teams started slow, we expect that as well. The games won’t be fast like we normally play. They will be slow, but as time goes they will get better and better. We have also only just started training, so it is difficult to know how to prepare the team physically, you don’t want to overload them.

You have been the head coach at Celtic for under a month now, are you excited for the challenge?

I was the co-coach with Lehlohonolo Seema, but now it is me alone now. I am so excited and looking forward to the challenge. It is not going to be easy, but with the [technical] team that I have around me, we think that together we are strong. We won’t change [the way we play], whatever you saw before, it will be more of the same thing. There won’t be much change in what we have been doing, it has been working for us.

Do you see the hunger in your players to reach the Nedbank Cup final?

We are looking forward to the game, we strongly believe we are ready and will be able to compete. It has been positive to see the players working hard. The effort at training and work rate has been amazing. We just hope we can take that into the game against Baroka and we apply ourselves in a good way to go to the next stage, which is the Nedbank Cup final.

How big is your squad that will go into the bio-bubble?

We are going with enough players into the bio-bubble. We have a big squad because the games are close to each other. I think there are more than 30 players, so there are enough to complete the remaining games. We have promoted some players from the MDC [MultiChice Diski Challenge] side as well.