22 Apr 2014

The national Under 15 football mentor, Ricardo Marape has expressed confidence in his boys after a win and a draw in friendly games with their Swaziland counterparts over Easter holidays.

Elton Ditshane scored the sole goal in their 1-0 win whilst Walter Setiko scored in the one-all draw.

“We are on the right track, the boys have improved a lot in our preparatory games for Africa youth tournament, but of course we can’t expect dramatic improvement like in older boys, but we believe that with more camps and friendlies we will turn the corner,” he said.

He said though thry were rusty in the first game, they managed a win and the team showed some improvement in the second game with some resilience in terms of ball passing and stamina and this would surely help their performance at the Africa Youth Games next month.

He said disruption for the team had been mainly because most of the players did not have teams and lacked play time and only got to practice at national level  on weekends and as such there had been no continuity to youth sides.

“We have just started full camp and the boys are not used to this intense training, their muscles are not ready and as such we are forced to have more friendly games to get the boys used to intense training, physically and mentally to shape them for international competitions, and of course we don’t want to overload them just because there is a competition coming, but slowly we should get them to the fitness level we want,” Marape said.

He said most of the youth sides and national team had been underperforming mainly because of lack of grassroots development like in other footballing nations.

“if we want our national teams to do well we must start at young age and have well rounded players, unlike now where we are concentrating at say 17 or two levels putting less efforts at under 10, 12, 14 and 15 categories. We need more sports academies and more development teams for each category from 6 to 20year olds, “ he said. ENDS