Zambia Women’s National team head coach Bruce Mwape believes his team needs high profile friendly matches to be ready for next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Mwape believes his team needs to face tougher opponents to be ready for the challenge that lies ahead of them at the global showpiece.
Mwape wants Zambia to take the route of Banyana Banyana and face high profile teams like Netherlands and Brazil.
“This tournament is just the beginning but we still need to prepare well. We need to play high-profile friendly matches so that we can gauge ourselves. Just depending on this tournament and friendly games against weaker teams then we will be cheating ourselves,” he said.
“We need to go for bigger teams like the South Africans are doing. They have so far played Netherlands and Brazil and I am sure they have learned something and that’s the route we also want to take.”
The Copper Queens concluded their group stage campaign on Tuesday with a 2-0 win over Eswatini but Mwape believes his team still need to be more clinical in front of goal.
Mwape made eight changes ahead of Tuesday’s match and explained that the decision helped him and his technical bench to assess the players ahead of the semifinal clash on Friday.
“Today’s (Tuesday) performance was okay although we missed a lot of chances, especially in the first half. The most important thing though is that we played mostly in our opponent’s half. Going forward we need to work on finishing because we missed just too many chances,” he said.
“We wanted to at least give everyone a chance so that we can come up with a strong team young into the semifinals, am sure we will have no problems as we have assessed all our players.
We could make maybe one-two changes in the team going into the semifinals.”
“This year’s tournament in our group some teams I think need to improve a lot because in other groups like group C there is stiff competition. They need to play more international games to compete,” he added.
The Copper Queens concluded group B matches with an 100 percent winning record scoring 11 unanswered goals in 3 matches to sail through to the semifinals.
Zambia will face the winner of group C with Malawi, Tanzania and Botswana all out with a chance to qualify.
Please we want copper queens to play friendlies game like our friends south Africa, Nigeria and Morocco