Botswana’s Jwaneng Galaxy head coach Morena Ramoreboli is delighted to lead the side to their first ever appearance in the CAF Champions League group stages.
The South African coach, who was able to pull miracle in Tanzania against Simba SC, is fond of doing the unthinkable. He masterminded the humiliation of Orlando Pirates in the 2013 Nedbank Cup while at Malutu FET College and winning the COSAFA Cup in July as Bafana caretaker coach.
In August he took the challenge of leading Botswana club for their CAF Champions League at the back of no domestic football in that country since covid-19 started causing mayhem at the beginning of last year.
In the final qualifying stage, it all looked certain that Simba would cruise to the group stages like they did last following a 2-0 away win.
However, Ramoreboli’s men managed to cause an upset on Sunday in Dar es Salaam as Galaxy claim a 3-1 comeback win to reach the group stages.
While speaking in an interview, Ramoreboli described this achievement as a proud moment of his coaching career.
“It is a great achievement for the club, the technical team, management, players and everybody who has been involved in this project,” he says.
“It has not been easy because when you lose 2-0 at home against a top team like Simba and you have to come away and fight in a game where you go to half-time trailing 1-0 but still try to keep players focused and give them hope.
“You try and manage to make sure that they remain believing and one thing that worked for us was to score the two goals early (in the second half) as it gave us the chance to play with confidence and dominance.
“There is so much that players in Botswana can achieve only if they believe in themselves. There is so much potential in this team and the fortunate part is that 80% of these boys are very young. We still believe that there is so much to be achieved and gained from the sacrifice by these boys.
“As a person I’m happy and I thank God for the journey. It has been a tough journey for me, but God had reasons why and we are here because of his grace. Credit to the players because there was one stage where I could see they were tired, but the belief was there to keep on pushing until the end,” says Ramoreboli.