"Just keep working": Tom Juma says on AFC Leoapards' bid to regain sharpness after barren draw with Talanta

On his first assignment as team head coach for FKF Premier League side AFC Leopards, Tom Juma on Sunday admitted that his side was yet to kick into new gear for the new season, saying that their improvement levels were ‘a work in progress.’

On a day when - owing to the top-down changes and arrival of multiple new signings - Ingwe was supposed to unleash a remarkably new dawn, the 12 time Kenya Premier League champions looked dull and labored to create any decent inroads to their opponents on the day, eventually settling for a barren draw with Talanta FC in the opening weekend game played at the Nyayo National Stadium.

It's one thing for Talanta head coach to have credited his men for ‘a good fight’ in securing the valuable point, but the spotlight was on the coach appointed to replace Patrick Aussems to make a case for the result, despite playing near half an hour with a man advantage following Lucas Weitere’s dismissal in the 60th minute of the contest.

“Our fitness level is not at the right place,” Juma, the club’s former Assistant coach said of his team’s display. “We’ve obviously not had a long enough time to work with the new players and as a group. That was evident given how Talanta played out today, they had ample time in pre-season and proved stubborn.”

Despite being the game favorites in many people’s eyes, it would have been an easy task to count on one hand the number of clear-cut chances AFC Leopards engineered on Sunday, with Talanta -even with lesser possession- being the team that had the best opportunity to score when Kevinton Machika rattled Maxwell Mulili's post shortly after the half-hour mark.

“It is always difficult to open up a team that decides to sit back and so deep,” the former Administration Police coach added. “They (Talanta FC) had two lines of four players each and to our credit, we still had a few outside opportunities that we failed to convert.”

Former bowler Lameck Onyango named Kenya men’s national team interim head coach

Fair to say however that majority of his starters Sunday were new members from the team they had last season, and Juma believed that the only way to achieve the much needed ‘fluidity’ was to ‘keep working’ though ‘a hard thing to predict’ on when a proper feel would be attained.

The next time Leopards play is on Friday 1 September against KCB. Maybe then, the team will have answered some few questions floating around.