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Cape Town - Cape Town City head coach Benni McCarthy says his side are aiming to apply pressure on their opponents this PSL season with a mixture of attacking play.
City get their campaign underway against Polokwane City in an MTN8 quarter-final clash on Saturday at Cape Town Stadium.
McCarthy, who has taken over the reins at City for his first stint as a head coach, says his aim is to add another attacking dimension to an already lethal counter-attacking team.
"I think last year the team relied a lot on counter-attacking," McCarthy said.
"They allowed teams to play against us, then hit them on the counter. I want it a little bit different, where we are putting teams under pressure.
"So I like a lot of high-pressing, but if you do it, you have to do it properly and that's what most of the training sessions have been about ... lots of high pressing where we put teams on the back foot instead of us being on the back foot.
"We don't want to just rely on counter-attacking, we want to have variation strategically."
The Cape side, who finished in an impressive third position last season, will be going into the quarter-final fixture handicapped as McCarthy admitted that they've struggled to gain enough information on their opponents.
"I spoke to Shaun Bartlett because they've [Tuks] played Polokwane recently in a pre-season friendly, so I asked Shaun for the footage because we couldn't find anything on them, regarding videos or Prozone stats," said McCarthy.
"We're going into Saturday's game blind-sided, but I think our focus has to be on us, how hard we work and how we do things and try not to get surprised by the opponent."
The MTN8 quarter-final clash gets underway at 15:00.
Baden Gillion is Sport24’s soccer journalist on all soccer related news. Follow Baden on Twitter
