On Saturday morning we called it the biggest catch-up chance of the season: seven Betway Premiership matches in one day, and a leader sitting on 96 points who had to be caught sometime. The weekend has been and gone. Philani is on 102 and the chase is further away than it was.
Behind him the board reads Siyabonga on 31, Thabang on 26, Itumeleng on 24 and Tshepiso on 15. Add those four together and you get 96, which is still six short of one man. That is not a leaderboard, it is a scoreboard with one name on it.
What makes it worse for everyone else is that the weekend was not short of chances. Eight matches went through the desk in the last 96 hours and only three exact scores came out of all of them. Siphamandla and Lwandle both had AmaZulu 1-0 over Golden Arrows when the most common call among seven fans was a goalless draw. Kamogelo was the one fan in nine who wrote down Orlando Pirates 2-1 Kaizer Chiefs. That is it. Nobody called Kruger United 3-1 over Richards Bay, nobody had Sundowns scoring four against Durban City, and the four fans who went 2-0 to Stellenbosch watched Chippa United win by exactly that.
So the points stayed where they were, and they stayed with Philani.
The next chance is Wednesday, and it is a big one. All seven remaining Betway Premiership fixtures go at 19:30 on Wednesday 4 November, which means another full card in a single evening. Twenty six predictions are in across the seven so far. Kaizer Chiefs against AmaZulu has the fewest, with three fans having touched it, and that is the match with the most on it: AmaZulu are third on 22 points and nine played, Chiefs are fifth on 14.
If you want to make ground on a leader this far clear, you do not do it by agreeing with everyone else on the easy ones. Three exact scores from eight matches tells you where the points actually live. The fixtures with the fewest predictions in, Chiefs against AmaZulu and Polokwane City against Kruger United among them, are where a full card is won or lost.