Cape Town City FC head coach Benni McCarthy has hit out at Kaizer Chiefs’ Zimbabwean defender Teenage Hadebe for “kicking” his players during the Nedbank Cup tie on Sunday.

Chiefs won the encounter 2-0 to progress to the semi-finals of the tournament but McCarthy feels the reason some of his players didn’t live up to expectations is because of the bad tackles they received from the Chiefs defenders.

“We started okay, wasn’t too bad,” McCarthy said, according to KickOff.

“But you could see the intentions from Chiefs were clear, and what I was expecting from my team, we didn’t do that.

“We started playing Kermit Erasmus, a 5 foot 2 player, against the big giants who want to hurt players, the Hadebes of today you know, because he does it over and over and over again. Players who have no intentions of just winning clean balls, he takes anything else off the spot and if he gets away with it, why [should he] stop?

“So yeah we started to play into Chiefs’ hands and when the ball doesn’t get to us, then you start seeing players doing things they are not supposed to do, and that was the case.”