BANYANA’S BEST TO GO FOR BROKE AGAINST UGANDA IN SEMIS
Coach says she will field her 11 best players for the showdown in Port Elizabeth on Thursday after a successful rotation policy
Banyana Banyana coach Desiree Ellis will field her best 11 players against Uganda in the semifinals of the Cosafa Women’s Championships at Wolfson Stadium, Port Elizabeth, on Thursday afternoon.
Ellis, 50, had been rotating players in each match during the tournament, and even made six changes for their final group game against Malawi.
Banyana progressed to the next stage of the tournament after topping Group A with nine points from three matches. They beat Madagascar 2-1 in their opener, followed by a 1-0 victory against Botswana. On Monday the national side overpowered Malawi 6-0 to book themselves a spot in the semis.
“You come to a tournament with a squad and it doesn’t make sense not to play anyone,” the former Banyana midfielder said.
“We want to make sure that we play everyone so that we can also see if they can go that level up.
“It’s important that we give players any opportunity to play. If they haven’t played a game you are not going to have the best out of them. But it also makes our pool bigger and we are very happy for that.
“The reason we have also given players an opportunity is to see what they have to offer, because we will sit down and select the best possible 11 that we feel is good enough to get the result for us.
“We wanted to see everyone playing so that we can decide this is the starting 11 that we will use now going forward in the semifinals. “We don’t want to underestimate anyone and we have said that from the word go. People expected us to play Zimbabwe and look what happened.
“We don’t want to be in a position where we underestimate at our own peril. We will put the best starting lineup on the pitch that we believe will get the results for us.”
The coach said they had enough footage to analyse Uganda but they would also concentrate on what they need to do as a team.
“Sometimes you analyse the opponent, but you don’t concentrate on your own team.
“We believe if we can concentrate on our team as well, once we have analysed the opponent then we will get the result that we want.”
Speaking about Monday’s win, Ellis said she was pleased with her girls’ performance.
“We didn’t start the tournament that well in terms of how we wanted to play, but we always knew we had a performance like this in us.
“We just kept working hard at training each and every day.
“We know what we were capable of, and on Monday we did not only play the way we wanted to play, but we also kept the game at a high tempo consistently.
“We created much more opportunities as well and scored a lot of goals.
“We had more shots on target again, but sometimes in the final third we are still making the wrong decisions.
“We are always looking at improving, but I am very happy with the performance and the results so far.”