Miguel Cardoso hints at Sundowns playing style against Esperance

Esperance were extremely defensive when the two sides met in the quarter-finals at Loftus Stadium, but striker Peter Shalulile was able to break the deadlock and hand Sundowns a slender lead.

The North Africans have promised to go all out in front of their own crowd tonight as Cardoso returns to a venue where he clinched the Tunisian championship with Esperance just last year.

He hinted at switching things up to see out the two-legged tie.

"We know what we are playing for, we know what context we have, we know what context we're gonna face. We know very well what we are here for, we know very well, what our ambitions and capacities are,” Cardoso said.

“And basically our objectives are clear for ourselves to go through this stage of the competition, that's what we worked for, for so long and that's how we've been preparing ourselves to arrive on tomorrow's match and be able to be very capable of playing the game the way that allows us to go through this stage."

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Sundowns were eliminated by an Esperance side coached by Cardoso last season and went on to reach the final.

It’s his job now to turn The Brazilians into a winning machine and the Portuguese mentor explained how.  

"Obviously, the will to win obliges you to have a proper level of preparation because there's no will when you are not well prepared and we've been working hard in the way we need to position ourselves in the game so that we can transform that will into reality,” the coach added.

“So, there's a way to do it, there's a way to transform the will into an objective and make an objective fulfilled. So, I think obviously this game would be a detailed game like the game we played in Joburg was a detailed game.

“Obviously, we know that there's a result that comes from the past but we know that result will not speak for itself, we have to go and play to win because usually teams that play to make draws, they usually become losers and what we want is indeed to play this game to win.

“I think that will be two strong teams inside the pitch, as Mosa said, with different ways to face the game, but also the game will have different moments and it's important that we relate with the different moments that the game might have."