We’ll focus on scoring - Ellis

Banyana Banyana coach Desiree Ellis (below) says she has been emphasising the need to be clinical in front of goal ahead of their first leg of the Africa Women’s Cup of Nations qualifier with Lesotho at Setsotso Stadium today.

The Banyana coach is hopeful her charges will be able to utilise their goal-scoring opportunities after what she saw at training.

“One of the areas we have addressed is goal scoring. We have spoken about this a lot of times,” she said. “We know it’s a big year for us and we want to address that problem continuously.

“I think there is excitement among players at training, the goalkeepers have been making saves and the players are scoring – hopefully, we will see that on Wednesday,” she continued.

“We have been in situations where we could have buried our opponents, say we score three or four goals by the time our opponents recover. We can’t afford to squander chances like that often. We don’t want to go through this again and we have been working hard on this area.

“So far so good, our stay has been good, we arrived in time and the players are excited and training has been going well.”

Going into this game, Ellis added, they won’t undermine Lesotho and she says they are a different team now, having made a number of changes in their squad.

“We will be ready, we are not going to underestimate them, it’s a new game and they have some new players in their squad. They have changed goalkeepers, but we are not going to concentrate much on the opponents, we will concentrate more on us and stop them from playing.”

The return match will be played at Dr Petrus Molemela Stadium in Bloemfontein on Sunday.

The overall winner of the twoleg tie will qualify for the 2018 Africa Women’s tournament set to be staged in Ghana from November 17 until December 1.