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Mamelodi Sundowns coach Miguel Cardoso has admitted that coming up against his former employers Esperance de Tunis will be “emotional”.
Downs host the North African in a CAF Champions League quarter-final first leg tie at Loftus Stadium tomorrow afternoon.
Cardoso, who led the Tunisian outfit to a league title last season but surprisingly left two months before joining The Brazilians, told CAF TV he now looks forward to potentially eliminating them from the competition.
"Facing Esperance after one season there is obviously emotionally an important moment, but we should understand that is a page that we closed when we came out of there," said Cardoso.
"We had big respect for those people – the management, the players that worked with us, and also for the fans, but I have big, big, big respect for Mamelodi Sundowns fans, the management that believed in me.
"And I'm truly focussed on making my players as strong as possible as a team so that we can obviously go through the competition in the next stage, and we'll cope with the right emotions.
"But I'm thankful that I can play against them, it's also a happy moment because it means that they continue to succeed until this moment, and I'll also have the opportunity to see people that I like, so good emotions around the game for sure."
Despite being top of the table in their domestic league, Esperance made another coaching change by hiring Maher Kanzari to replace Laurentiu Reghecampf over the FIFA break, and Cardoso says the reshuffle makes them unpredictable.
"I think I just know the players at the moment, some of them because others also changed, but you should understand what is important is that there's a new coach that, for sure, brought new ideas, so a new way to play," he added.
"That also implies that the players have different tasks in the team, so knowing the players in the end is perhaps not that important – it might be important, after we study them to the limit, what they are doing now and what they have been doing since we left.
"And then how we are going to cope with the way they play, with the way they want to establish their game, so that we can obviously achieve the result we need to win and go through this stage."
