Johannesburg - Though their play on the night was not fluid, Kaizer Chiefs coach Stuart Baxter believes that his team could have won their 0-0 Premiership stalemate with struggling TS Galaxy on Tuesday.
By drawing the game, Chiefs missed the chance to usurp Royal AM and go second in the log. With the title now firmly in the hands of Mamelodi Sundowns, the best that the Gauteng-based club can achieve this season is a second placed finish.
“We started quite well. The first 25 minutes were promising. We didn’t have that edge of quality that we needed,” said Baxter.
“It then became a game that we didn’t want. We lost the ball and gave them the ball while they did the same to us. There was no fluency in the game. In that kind of situation, either team can score. We tried to address it at half-time. We left the same shape and it was not better in the second half. When we went into a 4-3-3 formation, we created better chances.”
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Chiefs' struggles with inconsistency in recent years have been concerning. After entering the game on the back of a convincing 3-1 victory over Chippa United last Saturday, they would have been hoping to kill off Galaxy.
Baxter made a concession that anxious play may be getting the better of his team in crucial moments.
“We will look at the stats and see if we can see physical reasons but I can’t get inside their heads and find out about the psychological reasons but I suspect that the players are playing with too much anxiety at the moment.
“When things don’t go their way, they take it hard. It’s not a question of whether they don’t care, it’s a question of whether they care too much and they feel that the shirt weighs a little bit heavy and at halftime I tried to address that.”
Despite the stalemate, Chiefs remain third and one point adrift of Royal AM with a game in hand. Things do not get any easier for them as their next three games will be against SuperSport United, Stellenbosch FC and Marumo Gallants, before they take on Sundowns next month.