SuperSport CEO Matthews reads riot act to fringe players after Cup loss to minnows Dondol

SuperSport United CEO Stan Matthews has made his feelings clear to his fringe players following their Nedbank Cup shock exit after losing 1-2 to Dondol Stars in the first round on Wednesday.

Matthews said the fringe players will now have to convince him if they deserve to stay on at the club as he was not pleased with their commitment in that match and has now given them the remaining 11 matches to do that.

Speaking to SowetanLive's sister station Marawa Sports Worldwide (MSW) yesterday, Mathews said those players didn’t show enough desire to stay at the club.

“If the fringe players can’t come in and handle the ABC Motsepe team better, we should find out now in the heat of the battle than think we have extra depth that we don’t really have,” Matthews told Robert Marawa.

“So what does say to me is that the fringe players either took it too lightly or didn’t show enough desire to stay at the club. So we have 11 more games to change that, the new players that have come in also have to show that they have been brought in for a purpose not to come and participate and just cruise along in the football club.

“We are not going to tolerate that, for us the new players need to deliver and the guys who want to stay on [at] the club need to show that they really want to stay.

“That question will be answered in the next 11 games. I think it was not good enough last night, [Wednesday] and now we have to dust ourselves off, take a step back and say how are we going to fix this and how do we tweak in terms of our depth.”

SuperSport coach Gavin Hunt decided to rest some of his key players during that match for the upcoming DStv Premiership fixtures as they look to finish in the top four.

And Matthews said when he spoke to Hunt about this, he understood his reasoning.  “Gavin is a coach who believes very much as I do that the league is the bread and butter measuring of where we are as a football club,” he said.

“And when we discussed his strategy for last night’s game [Wednesday], to be honest with you I supported it because I said to him, ‘what do you want to do?

“He said I want to make sure we have our strongest team for the running and we have 11 games to go and we have people on three yellows.”