Cardoso Details Saleng Disciplinary Standoff And Squad Exclusion
Mamelodi Sundowns coach Miguel Cardoso has revealed how the club repeatedly tried to help Monnapule Saleng integrate into the squad, but recurring disciplinary issues eventually made the winger difficult to rely on.
Saleng has yet to return to the Sundowns matchday squad after last featuring for the club last season. The winger has also been sidelined this season and, according to Cardoso’s earlier comments, has yet to train with his teammates. He was also not part of the squad during the club’s pre-season preparations.
Cardoso has now provided further insight into the situation, explaining that Sundowns made several efforts to help Saleng become part of the group before the matter eventually became a club issue rather than something for the coach to deal with.
“Look, I don’t want to speak too much about that, because now Saleng is a club issue, not a coach’s issue,” he said.
“He was never a coach’s issue. He was always a player who gave a lot of effort.
“We tried so much to push him towards the group, towards the dynamics of the group, towards the behaviours that a professional player has to have and the mental stability that a player has to have.
“But when the norm inside the group is very disciplined, where we have no issues and a lot of understanding about the rules, the locker room has rules established by the players themselves that determine how to behave, how to exist and how to relate.
“And when a player systematically breaks these kinds of rules towards his teammates, the coaches or the club, we don’t know what we can count on. So there’s a moment when you ask yourself: How can we count on something when we don’t know what he’s going to do?”
Cardoso then gave an example of what he described as repeated incidents involving Saleng, saying the winger could be named in the squad but fail to arrive when the team was preparing to travel.
“Imagine you train all week normally, and then you put his name on the list, and on the day we are waiting for him to enter the bus, he just literally doesn’t appear,” he added.
“So these things didn’t happen once. They happened twice, three, four times, with him being the last to arrive and the first to go away.
“It’s difficult to have, let’s say, a process of development of a player.
“I think you highlighted in the media that we tried at the beginning of the season to give him a lot of support. So our attitude towards him after he failed with us was: let’s not put him apart.
“Let’s embrace him. Let’s try to give him stability. Let’s give him love. Let’s make him feel important.
“I don’t know if you remember, but my assistant showed me in the media that there was a moment I was dancing with him in the middle of the circle of the players, myself trying to exactly make him understand how we wanted him to integrate into the family.
“But to be part of a family, you also need to really want to be in the dynamics of the family. That’s basically how it is.
“And it’s the last time I’m going to speak about it, because it’s a club issue, and no longer a coach’s question.”
Saleng’s situation at Sundowns bears similarities to his final period at former club Orlando Pirates. He played only during the first half of the 2024/25 season before being sidelined for the remainder of the campaign.
At the end of that season, it also appeared that Saleng had disagreements with then-Pirates head coach Jose Riveiro, as shown in the club’s camp show.
