Half an hour in, it was perfect. Sipho Chaine spilled a cross, Pule Mmodi got there first, and the gold half of a sold-out FNB Stadium made a noise you feel in your chest. Level, unbeaten in the league all season, and Fernando Da Cruz, in his first derby, looking like he belonged. Early in the second half, Tshepang Moremi had an open goal and did not miss. The run was about to end. This is a Soweto Derby fan reaction from one end of the ground only, and not the black and white end. By the end of Saturday, this seat had done something it never planned to do. It had cheered for Mamelodi Sundowns.
First, the declaration. The Fan Seat picks a side, and today it wears Kaizer Chiefs colours. Pirates people and the Sundowns faithful are welcome to sit with us; every fact below is checked as carefully as any match report. The afternoon, goal by goal, is in our derby report, and the night in Rustenburg is in our Sundowns report.
Soweto Derby fan reaction: the half hour we believed
Here is what a derby does to a Chiefs supporter. You arrive with eight league games and no defeats, and you still do not quite trust it, because five of those eight were draws and every one of us can count. But unbeaten is unbeaten. On Tuesday Wandile Duba scored a hat-trick against TS Galaxy on this very pitch. So you let yourself hope.
For a while the hope looked sensible. Early on, Mduduzi Shabalala put Duba through, and Chaine saved. Yanela Mbuthuma put Pirates ahead on 24 minutes, and six minutes later we were level, courtesy of a goalkeeper who does not usually give anything away. That is the derby in miniature: the other lot hand you one chance, and you had better take it. We took it.
The second half is where the feeling turned. Thapelo Mokobodi, who had a hand in both Pirates goals by Afrik-Foot’s account, laid it on for Moremi, and nobody in gold was near enough to stop it. And then the chance that will keep us awake all week. Duba was through again, alone, with only Chaine to beat and our whole end halfway out of its seats. Chaine won. The keeper who gave us a goal took one straight back.
There is a particular quiet that settles over the losing half of a full derby in the last quarter of an hour. It is not anger. It is arithmetic. You start counting the minutes, then you start counting what this is going to cost.
Why this one hurts more than one defeat should
Context matters, so here it is without the tinted glasses. Chiefs have not won a league derby since February 2023, ESPN noted before kick-off. Pirates did the league double over us in 2023/24 and again in 2024/25. Last season we took a single point from two league meetings, a 3-0 defeat and a 1-1 draw, as The Citizen recorded. Our one recent joy came in a cup, the 2025 Nedbank Cup final. And Orlando Pirates are still to lose a derby with Abdeslam Ouaddou in charge.
So this was never going to be easy. It was, though, a real chance. Da Cruz only arrived at the start of the season, and a win would have cut the gap to Pirates from eight points to five. Instead, the PSL’s own log, checked on Sunday morning, has Chiefs fifth on 14 points from nine games: 11 behind Pirates and 12 behind the leaders.
And the leaders are not Pirates. That is where Saturday turned strange. The Buccaneers went top in the afternoon and stayed there for a few hours. Then Mamelodi Sundowns kicked off against Durban City at 20:15 in Rustenburg and won 4-1, Thabang Matuludi heading two of the four. Sundowns are back on top with 26 points from 10 games, and Pirates are second on 25 with a game in hand. Read the PSL’s columns closely and they say one more thing: neither of the top two has lost a league game this season.
The honest take: cheering for Sundowns is not a plan
So yes. Late on Saturday night, this Chiefs supporter was glad to see Sundowns win. Anything that knocks Pirates off the top on derby day feels like a small mercy, and I suspect plenty of you in gold felt the same.
But here is the uncomfortable part. Cheering for one rival to beat another is what you do when your own club is not in the race. With Sunday’s log in front of us, that is roughly where Chiefs stand. Pirates and Sundowns are arguing over first place. We are arguing over who gets the best view.
After the match Da Cruz said his side should have finished the game off in the first half. He also questioned the officiating, arguing that the opening goal was offside and that a Pirates player deserved a second yellow card, as Briefly and Pan Africa Football reported. About the chances, he is right: Duba alone had two good ones. On the referee, I will leave the arguing to the coach. Supporters have blamed officials for derby defeats for longer than most of us have been alive, and it has never once changed the log.
The honest take is simpler. Chiefs are hard to beat now, and that is real progress under a coach who has been here a matter of months. But hard to beat is not the same as hard to stop, and five draws in nine league games tell you which one we are. The title is not lost in November. It is, though, being chased by two clubs with 16 wins from 19 league games between them.
The next chance to feel better is at home in the knockout cup against Siwelele, once the PSL confirms the date. The next league derby will come round too, and Ouaddou’s record will be waiting for us. Until then, a confession and a promise. The confession: on Saturday night, I cheered for Sundowns. The promise: it will not happen again until the day it is useful.