‘Princesses ready to snatch Canada tictket’

After two weeks of intensive training, Coach Bashir Hayford says the Black Princesses are ready to snatch the ticket to the 2014 Women’s World Cup (WWC) from Equatorial Guinea when they meet for the final qualifier at the Accra Stadium on Sunday.

Equatorial Guinea at the moment have the advantage courtesy a 1-0 result from the first leg in Malabo and stand the chance of making their debut at the tournament in Canada if the result stays the same.

However, Coach Hayford says the dream of Equatorial Guinea will remain so as the Princesses intend to go all out not only to overturn the result but also win in a convincing manner.

In the first leg, the Princesses were badly exposed in midfield and allowed the Equatorial Guineans to frustrate their game plan. In the past two weeks, the technical team seem to have fixed that midfield problem and are poised for Sunday’s challenge.

Indications are that the Equatorial Guineans, who have drafted the technical team of their senior team, as well as their Portuguese and Brazilian technical support, are storming Accra possibly for another victory or at worse a draw to secure their first Under-20 WWC ticket to Canada.

By now, the technical team should have identified a playmaker who would literally carry the team on her shoulders as that has been missing from the team so far. Captain Beatrice Sesu has not done badly leading the team so far, but she needs to push her girls on the pitch to play to instruction and drive them to play for positive results.

Also, whoever is chosen as the goalkeeper for the day must keep her as a momentarily loss of  concentration resulted in that loss in Malabo.

Though Coach Hayford will not talk about his game plan for Sunday, he told the Graphic Sports that the team would take care of business first before thinking of playing ‘fine football’. He said while they had worked on the problems that they identified during the first leg, they have also worked on the players psychologically so they could deliver on Sunday.

“Our focus is winning and we would want to take care of it as early as we can. We have also worked on the girls psychologically so that they do not put themselves under pressure but remain calm and play to tactical instructions and hopefully, victory will be delivered,” Coach Hayford indicated.

Hopefully, Coach Hayford and his team can be trusted to deliver on their promise and the fans who will offer to be at the stadium to cheer the team can celebrate a third successive World Cup appearance for Ghana.