Signeul announces ten-game build-up for Euros after signing new contract

Scotland coach Anna Signeul has announced an ambitious programme of ten games before Euro 2017 gets underway in the Netherlands in July. The sequence starts with a double-header of friendlies against Denmark in Cyprus later this month.

The Swede and the Scottish FA also both appear to have kept their options open as to what direction to take after the Euros. Signeul’s last contract ran out in December and it was revealed yesterday that the latest one is for seven months only.

“I have signed a new contract till the end of the Euros in August,” she said at the Oriam national performance centre in Edinburgh which is now her base. “That is what I and the SFA both wanted. I am just focusing on the Euros now.”

The arrangement means that Signeul can review her options before the 2019 World Cup qualifying campaign gets underway in the autumn – as can the governing body.

In recent years Scotland have regularly hovered around No 20 in the Fifa women’s

0 Anna Signeul: Options open. rankings, and have also been among the second seeds for Euro and World Cup qualifying. Signeul, 55, hopes that Scotland can emerge from the Group D games against England, Portugal and Spain and reach the Euro quarter-finals in Holland. Her intensive preparations begin with the first of the two Denmark friendlies in Larnaca a week on Friday.

“We are really looking forward now to the six months of preparing for the Euros,” Signeul, who replaced Vera Pauw as national coach in March, 2005, said. “This is something many of us have worked for for 12 years.”

Signeul’s 23-woman squad for the Denmark games includes two uncapped players – goalkeeper Rachel Harrison and forward Claire Emslie. The national coach says a further ten players are also under consideration for the Euros.

Fringe candidates will be given opportunities to stake claims against the Danes – and also in March when the Scots return to the island for the four-game Cyprus Cup. “In these two friendlies, and again in the Cyprus Cup everyone can play,” Signeul said. “When we come to April or June we need to find a starting eleven for the tournament.”

The head coach has already decided that Kim Little, who recently rejoined Arsenal, will be in central midfield for the three Group D games in Holland as opposed to the No 10 role she occupied in the qualifiers.