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Cape Town - Cape Town City coach Eric Tinkler hailed the importance of kicking off their Premiership campaign for 2017 with three points after grabbing a convincing 3-0 win over Highlands Park at the Cape Town Stadium on Tuesday night.
Talisman Lebogang Manyama continued his remarkable scoring record for City when he fired in the first goal of the game in the 5th minute before new January signing, Letsie Koapeng doubled the home side's lead in the 32nd minute.
Judas Motseamedi put the game to bed after scoring the third goal of the game in the 88th minute to ensure that City keep pace with Wits, who moved to the top of the league standings.
City, despite the win dropped to second spot on the log with 28 points after 14 games and trail the Clever Boys by goal difference after Gavin Hunt's men gave Ajax Cape Town a soccer lesson in a 5-0 rout.
After the game Tinkler was quick to point out that despite importantly starting the year off with a win their objectives had not changed from reaching the 30-point mark to guarantee their safety in the PSL.
"It's always going to be important that first win," Tinkler said.
"I explained to the players that we let ourselves down at the end of the first-half of the season because we found ourselves on 24 points after 12 games. After that we threw away points against Platinum Stars and Free State Stars and we could have reached that 30-point mark before the recess.
"That has always been target number one, for me, and I explained to them that that hasn't changed, we still haven't reached that target and our points-to-game ratio has dropped, we're five below.
"So it means we've got to win five in a row in order to get back to our two points a game ratio, so I explained that to the team and that's what our focus needs to be now."
The former Orlando Pirates coach was also satisfied with the performances of the new additions to the side after strengthening the squad in the January window.
"The guys who made their debut, they did well although Edmilson did tire towards the end but that's only normal as he comes from the Mozambican league where their season ended. So his fitness levels are not where they should be but every game he'll get better and stronger and he also had to learn a bit about the pace of our game as it's quite frantic. But we saw that with Roland (Putsche) when he first arrived.
"Letsie is a goal scorer and I thought he did very well today. You know I thought it was a bit of a risk to be entirely honest, throwing him straight in but he was impressing us in training, scoring a lot of goals so we gave him the opportunity and he benefited from that and so did we."
City next face Ajax Cape Town in a much anticipated Cape derby at Cape Town Stadium on Saturday with the two teams experiencing very different fortunes going into the clash.
Kick off is at 20:15.
