AmaZulu coach Pablo Franco Martin says he is ready to meet all the expectations and ambitions of the club as he gears up for his second season in charge at Usuthu. 

The Spanish-born mentor did enough in his debut season to retain the club hierarchy’s trust in him, after an 11th-place finish in the league and reaching the quarterfinals of the Nedbank Cup for the first time since the 2011/12 campaign. 

Now, in his second season with the Durban-based outfit, Martin expects a tough season ahead of the commencement of the Betway Premiership after the international break, but he remains optimistic about doing better than he did last term. 

“We know that it’s going to be a tough season for all the teams, and we have big expectations, ” he said. 

“As I already mentioned we want to do better than the last season, we trust in the personnel we have in terms of players, technical staff, and management.” 

The former Real Madrid analyst believes his team is on the right track, drawing inspiration from the marginal achievements of the last campaign as he looks to build on the foundation laid in his first season and emphasizes the importance of collecting points from the get-go. 

“I think we are on the right path, last season we improved the team in the log, and we already achieved quarterfinals in cups [Nedbank Cup] after 15 years. We promoted players to the national team, now we want to keep doing that job and keep building from those foundations to be able to achieve more than last season. 

“We are ambitious, we don’t want to put limits on ourselves, let’s see what happens in the beginning of the season. It’s important to collect points, which we didn’t do last season, it was tough for us, ” the 44-year-old coach added. 

Martin, who has been entrusted with president Sandile Zungu’s target of returning the club to continental football, says he feels confident about meeting the expectations, citing that he now has a better understanding of the league and his squad. 

“Now we know the league better, we know our squad better, we know what to do. There’s the uncertainty of not playing for more than three months which is something that we need to see how we avoid, but except that we are confident with big expectations for the upcoming season, ” he said. 

“I think we got good results last season. It doesn’t mean that for us it was enough because as I said we are ambitious.  

“We know the quality that we have as the technical staff, we know the amazing work that we did, we know how the team was before we arrived and the evolution of it, so we need to continue with that evolution from last season to reach our targets.”  

Usuthu have bolstered their team with the loan signing of Mamelodi Sundowns trio Luvuyo Phewa, Sifiso Ngobeni, and Etiosa Ighodaro in addition to Kwanda Mngonyama amongst others, as they prepare for their first league encounter against Polokwane City on Saturday, 14 September (20:00).

Article by Trevor Magoro