Richards Bay signed off with victory over AmaZulu

Richards Bay signed off the year with an impressive victory over AmaZulu in their Kwazulu-Natal derby on Friday with a 2-0 home win at the Umhlathuze Sports Complex seeing them move up to ninth in the Betway Premiership standings.

It was their last game before the mid-seaon break and they will not play again until mid-January.

Coach Ronnie Gabriel was understandably delighted with his team’s performance as he said afterwards

ON THE PERFORMANCE

“I think looking at our last few performances, this type of performance was coming. It was coming. We were just missing goals in the last two performances, and we asked the group for a holistic performance, and I think it was a complete performance, the way we defended, the way we attacked, the way we dealt with the transitions. At one moment in the game, it became full of transitions, and we had to be anaerobically conditioned to deal with those moments, and I think the group responded well during those challenges that we faced. But all in all, and you know what I say it humbly … it was a totally dominant display. Today, the score could have been bigger, we missed a lot of chances. I felt that we could have put in a few more goals and topped up the score. But we'll take the two goals and remember that we are growing team. We are a team on the up and we'll get better as the season progresses.”

ON WHETHER IT HAS BEEN A SATISFACTORY YEAR?

“It has been a good 2025. I think the way we ended last season, getting into the top eight, and the way we started this season. Yes, we had a few hiccups here and there, but it was nothing major and it was not something that we were too worried about because based on the performances, we were giving good displays out there. And it was just a matter of time before we would get this complete display and what a way to get it. I mean, in front of our home crowd and closing up for the December break, we're happy with making the supporters happy and the management is happy, and we got to continue to grow from this.”

ON SELLING KEY PLAYERS AT THE END OF LAST SEASON

“Actually, the policy of the club, the blueprint of the club, allows for players to leave the system, and we've got enough of talent coming through the DDC structures, and the players that came in were sufficient to fill in the void. However, we are still progressing, and the youngsters are still getting used to the level of competition, the adaptation processes are still in place and they're responding very, very well. We're not worried. We were confident with the group that we had, and the group that we assembled, and we felt that they're going to respond, and they responded positively.”

ON DOMINATING AMAZULU ON FRIDAY

“We must commend our young team, for playing this type of football, the tempo of the game. High tempo football, playing with aggression, playing with desire, playing the game on the front foot, taking the game to a strong AmaZulu team who are higher up on the log. We had to have confidence to do that. It was not an easy process. We had to build that up, leading up to the game, the belief and the structure of the team to say that we can take the game to AmaZulu, and we can dominate the game out, and that's exactly what they did.”