Zambia Women’s National Team head coach Bruce Mwape has declared his lasses ready and free from injury ahead of the 2020 COSAFA Women’s Championship to be played in South Africa from November 3-14.
Speaking in an interview with the ZamFoot Crew today, Mwape said his players are fit and ready.
“So far so good, of late most of them are fit, we played a friendly match against Green Buffaloes Under-17 and they showed that they can even match some of these boys as compared to other women’s team and after this friendly game no one complained of any injury,” Mwape said.
Coach Mwape will be traveling to South Africa with a few new faces and a different squad with a couple of players who were influential last year such as Midfielders Rhoda Chileshe owing to an injury, Mary Mwakapila recently joined Israeli side Hapoel Be’ersheba while the striking duo of Racheal Nachula and Hellen Mubanga also missing out as they are now plying their trade in Spain with Zaragoza CFF.
However, the Queens’ gaffer said although some key names will be missing out, he is hoping the players he has will do better than last year’s second-place finish and he has challenged them to prove a point in the national team.
“Somehow it will affect our game plan although this will give room to others who can prove that they can play for the senior national team. Barbra Banda is here with us and she was part of the team that played a friendly against Buffaloes and she actually did well, all I can say is that it will affect us but we will try by all means to do better than ee did last year,” Mwape told the ZamFoot Crew.
Mwape who has included a blend of young players has singled out Green Eagles’ skillful Midfielder and Green Buffaloes’ striker Maylan Mulenga to have been doing very fine in training and he will be counting on the availability of China-based Banda who was the top goal scorer in the 2020 Chinese Taiping CFA Women’s Super League with a remarkable 18 goals in 13 appearances for Shangai Shengli who finished 3rd in the league.
“The young ones like Natasha Nanyangwe and Maylan Mulenga are both doing fine as compared to other young players,” he said.
“Although we are lacking the much needed striking force with the presence of Barbara I don’t think that will be a problem and a few others that will play,” he added.
The Copper Queens are in Group B alongside Lesotho and Malawi and they will be heading in this tournament with heads high aiming to do better than how they performed previously by grabbing the championship.
The ladies will start their campaign on November, 4 against Lesotho before winding up the group stages with old foes Malawi at the Isaac Wolfson Stadium with Kick-off time being 12:30hrs in both matches.
