29/07/2024
PRESIDENT’S CORNER: Copper Queens Need Our Support More in this Hour
A sombre Monday salutation to our beloved football family. This week’s interaction comes off the Copper Queens Olympic assignment that ended in a 6-5 loss to Australia in Nice. It was a game that we definitely had everything going our way and had everyone on the edge of their seats. It is not yet time to provide a full postmortem of the Olympic assignment as we still have one more game to play against Germany in St Etienne on Wednesday.
Our game against Australia has left us wondering what could have been, given the many opportunities we were ahead in the match. Like every game, we will be expecting that it is reviewed and rectify the mistakes before our final game against Germany. Mathematically, we still have a chance to sneak into the quarterfinals as one of the best losers. Other than the motivation to make it into the quarterfinals, we will also be obliged to redeem our national pride with a win on the final day of Group B matches.
One of the positives in the Australia game was our ability to create and bury chances. We were also delighted to see our captain, Barbra Banda earn another record with a tournament hat-trick. She took her record of Olympic Games hat-tricks to three which is a world record. The milestone should inspire our athletes to be world beaters. Overall, the team requires everyone’s support to recover from the two losses. We can rally behind them to wind up with a win against Germany. We will be back with a postmortem in the aftermath of the tournament and provide direction from this point onwards.
Back home, we have had the national team selection exercise going on across the 10 provinces. The exercise has seen various technical experts involved from the provincial to the national level. We have also brought on board some of the respected coaches in our game. Former national team coaches Wedson Nyirenda, Beston Chambeshi and Aggrey Chiyangi will be part of the trainers involved in the selection exercise.
The selection exercise which was a recommendation of the technical committee and approved by the executive committee provides a window through which we can see how much talent we have across that can be groomed and infused in our national team structures. We have borrowed from the experience of experts that have lived through various phases of our national teams. The All Stars versus The Rest will be the final stage of this exercise that will be staged in Lusaka.
Have a productive week!
