The Zambia Women’s National Team will this evening square off with the Atlas Lionesses of Morocco in the first of their two series friendly.
With Paris 2024 Olympic qualifiers and the 2024 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers coming up, coach Bruce Mwape will use these two matches to shape up his side.
The two teams also met prior to the kick off of the 2022 WAFCON a match which ended 1-1, Grace Chanda with the goal for Zambia.
Bruce Mwape says the team will take the two games seriously and target a win to help move them up on the FIFA Women’s World rankings.
Mwape is aware of how tough Morocco is and believes they will give his side a good challenge ahead of the Olympic and WAFCON qualifiers.
“The two games being on a FIFA calendar it’s important to get good results so that we can also move on the FIFA rankings, we need to be in the top five in Africa and the World in the top 50. So it’s important we do well in both games,” he said.
“I think these are the kind of teams we would like to play with when it comes to preparations for qualifiers because they are a strong high profile side. We are not taking these games lightly, we want to be serious so that we come up with a strong side before facing Mali.”
“The area we would like to improve on is the defence. If you look at how we played at the World Cup, we conceded a lot of goals in the first two games. We want to defend as a team and have a solid backline,” he added.
Meanwhile skipper Barbra Banda wants the team to start with a win so that they set themselves up for a good qualification journey both for the Olympics and WAFCON.
“It’s very important to start on a good note. These games are preparations for the big assignments coming ahead of us. We have to win the game, we have a very big task ahead of us with the (Paris) Olympics qualifiers and WAFCON qualifiers.”
The Copper Queens will square off with the Atlas Lionesses at the Père Jégo Stadium in Casablanca this evening before facing them again in the second fixture billed for Moulay Hassan Stadium in Rabat on 22 September 2023.
Kick-off will be at 20h00CAT and the match will be live on TopStar, GOtv and SuperSport.
