Filipinas hold heads high
The Philippine U17 women’s football team isn’t fazed by its 0-2 loss to England last Tuesday at the Mima Cup in San Pedro del Pinatar in Murcia, Spain.
Head coach Sinisa Cohadzic still held the Filipinas in high regard after playing against one of the best countries in the world despite only getting to work with the squad 10 days ago.
The Mima Cup serves as one of the Filipinas’ preparations for the AFC U17 Women’s Asian Cup 2024 which starts on 22 April in Indonesia.
“Tremendous result against one of the best nations in the age group. But again, It’s not about the result. It’s about the process of where we wanna go and what our objective is and our objective is to get this group together and make them fit enough, strong enough and understand our principles of what we want to do and today was the start of it,” Cohadzic said.
“It was a tremendous effort to be able to just, after working with them for 10 days, come out and be very competitive and hold our structure and troubled England as we did. This game showed that they could work together and it showed that they had just real desire and inspiration to give everything for the nation.”
The Filipinas will cap off their Mima Cup campaign against Sweden on 8 February.
Cohadzic said she wants to make sure the Filipinas absorb everything they have experienced in the tournaments against teams from Europe when they march to Indonesia for the Asian Cup.
“We need the fame of this camp and going forward towards the Asian Cup. It’s an adaptation for making sure that we can play different systems and make sure we can change our way of playing against different nations,” Cohadzic said.
“Against Sweden, it’s another country that we need to be challenged and we need to just work hardware with it today.”