Banyana Banyana Head Coach Desiree Ellis says says that it was good for her players to get some game time, after friendly wins against Zambia and Botswana this week.
Banyana beat Zambia 3-1 on Saturday and followed that up with a 2-0 win over Botswana yesterday, and Ellis says that they used the games to test a few combinations, and try a few things tactically.
She says that overall she was pleased, but the team could have done even better.
“Look, we were able to try out a few different things, especially in the Botswana game,” Ellis said after the win against Botswana.
“We wanted to make sure that especially Tiisetso (Makhubela), who had not played for a while, get’s a good 90 minutes under her belt. She went with us to the World Cup, but was not available for the Cosafa Cup. Noxolo (Cesane) was not available for the Cosafa Cup either, we wanted to make sure that she also gets some minutes.”
“And we tried a few different combinations as you saw, because we want to make sure that we have all our bases covered. But it becomes very difficult if a team doesn’t really come to play. You know, the onus was on us to open them up and I felt in the first half especially, we said they can make the middle very compact, and gonna put a low block and we need to go wide, but yet we wanted to force to go through the middle.”
“So we try to stretch them especially in the second half, made a few changes, also positional changes, and then we started creating more. But we need to realize those moments earlier.”
“I think the second game was going to be challenging physically because we haven’t had league football for a very long time. Players have just been training and become so shot after the after the Zambia game, but I was impressed the way we controlled the game at times. We could up the pace, we could bring the pace down, but at moments we needed to rotate the ball much quicker.”
