07 Apr 2016

A night of high-octane football is on the cards as heavyweights, Township Rollers and Mochudi Centre Chiefs clash in a beMOBILE premiership match at the National Stadium on Saturday at 8 pm.

The battle for league honours will be at stake. With four matches to go, Rollers are top with 60 points, with second placed Centre Chiefs and third placed Orapa United both on 56.

A triumph for Rollers will take the Blues to within touching distance of the title, giving them a seven point cushion over Magosi.

While Madinda Ndlovu’s Orapa United, who will face Popa in their last game of the season will still want the title race to go down to the wire, for Chiefs, a loss on Saturday could have dire consequences.

As such, the Kgatleng giants will want to defeat Rollers, who still have to face Police XI, Green Lovers and Orapa, and cut the gap at the top to a single point.  

Yet, the battle for the new premiership trophy launched at the beginning of the season is just a sub plot.

The intense rivalry between the Blues and Magosi-Maaparankwe is another dimension that always guarantees stimulating football.

Apart from Gaborone United’s 2009 league title, Rollers and Chiefs have won every league championship since 2008, and the two have attracted the cream of local football talent. 

With the two sides competing for honours and poaching each other’s players and technical staff, the rivalry the two sides had long developed became even more heated. This turned Rollers versus Centre Chiefs into an ‘El Classico’ of sorts. On their day, Centre Chiefs play attractive football, and are easily the best local side at playing flowing carpet football.  

Their statistics indicate they are a side on form, having gone 14 league games unbeaten, winning 10 and drawing four.

But that run was punctuated by two losses to Rollers, in the two-legged Mascom Top 8 semi-final. Also the last time Magosi lost a league match last October 25 it was to Popa. 

Mike Sithole will have been concerned about how his side looked second best to the Blues on four occasions this season.

Rollers beat Chiefs 3-2 in the Kabelano Charity Cup final, which signaled the start of the domestic football season.   Then in the first round league match on October 25, Rollers defeated Chiefs by another 3-2 score line, before triumphing 3-1 and 2-0 in the two legs of the Mascom Top 8 semi final.

The memory of these losses will only serve to spur Chiefs on to give everything on the night in pursuit of victory.   

What everyone in the football fraternity can expect is a night of enthralling football. Ends