Orlando Pirates coach Milutin ‘Micho’ Sredojevic apologised to the club’s supporters after his team failed to live up to expectations in their first game of the season.

After much excitement throughout pre-season following an impressive 2017-18 campaign, Pirates served up a lacklustre performance against Highlands Park as they slumped to a 1-1 draw on Saturday evening at the Orlando Stadium.

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Micho had promised the Buccaneers faithful that the team would be serving ‘delicious food’ once the season started.

The comments helped fuel the fans’ optimism as they swarmed to the stadium in numbers to support their team.

The Soweto giants, however, failed to give the fans what they wanted as an early howler from goalkeeper Wayne Sandilands was cancelled out by a Justin Shonga penalty early in the second half. Despite throwing players forward, the Sea Robbers couldn’t find a winner.

The disappointing result led Sredojevic to issue an apology to the fans, who he referred to as the team’s ‘spiritual owners’.

‘First of all, I need to tell you the power of this team, we have our spiritual owners – our supporters, whose hard lives we want to make as happy as possible,’ said the Serbian.

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‘We have worked very hard in order to come and serve them in the best possible way. However, some things in this game you can’t control.

‘I would say that I have the deepest regret, and I would apologise to our supporters for this situation that was very unfortunate. I do not remember, in a long time, when Orlando Stadium was this much [full] with supporters.

‘To whoever had come, we deeply regret what happened. We owe them, and I have a sense that, with the effort of the players, they had given everything, but football is like that.

‘But, having in mind that this is a marathon of 30 matches, it is not good to be on this side to not have won something like we had planned. However, the blessing in disguise is that this is a league where you can still do corrections by way of collecting points when you have dropped some.

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‘We owe it to our supporters, and I need to put my hand up and say, in a way, this is far from being the best that this team can do. We believe in the work we’re doing, we believe in the players and we know we shall do much better.

‘We also believe the support will come even more because we are getting the driving force from our supporters, and we shall still keep on until they are satisfied with results and with the football,’ concluded the Pirates coach.

Photo: Sydney Mahlangu/BackpagePix