• Baroka FC played a decisive role in determining the fate of the Absa Premiership title.
• The Limpopo club beat Sundowns 1-0 and held Kaizer Chiefs to a 1-1 draw.
• These valuable points saw Baroka keep their topflight status.

Battling Baroka FC, the modest, burgeoning Limpopo province club with a penchant for providing the unpredictable and unexpected, played the decisive role in deciding the Absa Premiership title as they showed up both champions Mamelodi Sundowns and runners-up Kaizer Chiefs in critical games.

At the same time, Baroka saved their own premier division status by what ultimately turned out to be a single goal.

And more ironical than the results in Baroka's 1-0 win over Sundowns and the ultimate and telling 1-1 draw with a bewildered Chiefs, who had headed the championship race in the protracted and extended almost year-long season due to the coronavirus pandemic, was the manner in which the Limpopo side kept their cool against their more vaunted opponents.

These were no freakish scorelines in which luck was the overriding factor in producing the results that in turn devastated the Sundowns and Amakhosi fraternity and followers, but the product of a team keeping their cool in the face of a major crisis against opponents who were inclined to panic and did not deserve to win the respective games in question.

When Baroka played the Brazilians a matter of hours after what seemed the death knell of Chiefs' championship aspirations as a result of the shock, late 1-0 loss to Bidvest Wits, the general consensus was that Sundowns had a third successive league title on a plate - and the early, seemingly complacent response of their players was that they needed only to see out the scheduled 90 minutes to be anointed with the championship crown once again.

Instead Boroka did Chiefs and themselves an almighty favour with what was a well-earned, professional victory that had Amakhosi back in the driver's seat with the same number of points as Sundowns, a five-goal superior goal difference and only two rounds of games against lowly-placed opponents still to play.

Baroka, however, had other ideas and chose to compensate for the cruel blow they had imposed on Sundowns against Chiefs.

So while the club whose motto is "The Sky is the Limit" are now in seventh heaven and the Naturena-based team who were once heaped with ongoing honours almost as a formality are wallowing in the depths of a title famine, Baroka coach Dylan Kerr and his players can rightly boast they showed up both of them!