Banyana Banyana coach Desiree Ellis and her players say the honeymoon period is over for the African champions and it’s now back to hard work as the team prepares for next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
The South African senior women’s national team will face the highly ranked Brazil in two much anticipated international friendlies. The first match will be at Orlando Stadium on Friday evening.
This will be Banyana Banyana’s first match since they were crowned Women’s African Cup of Nations champions in July.
The match between the African champions and newly crowned Copa America champions is a high profile encounter. This will be only the second ever meeting between the two nations.
The first time the two teams faced each other was in at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, in a match that ended goalless. The stakes will be high again this time around as both teams start their preparations for next year’s World Cup.
“They are a top team; they won Copa America, a lot of their players play for big clubs abroad. They have a top coach who has coached all over the world so I think it’s going to be an exciting game but it’s going to be a real test for us and that’s what we want so early. You know especially after Wafcon to test the players to see where we at. But we are expecting the crowd to come out you know, we’ve played for a long time without any fans in the stadium and we hope that the fans will come and support us in this game,” says Ellis.
Both countries will go into the game high in confidence. Brazil, who are ranked a respectable ninth place in the world, have not lost a match this year. They were crowned champions of South America in July.
“It’s about improving all the time. At Wafcon we conceded three goals and I felt we could have done better in those situations as a team and individually and the higher the level goes you going to make sure make sure you minimise the mistakes. This is one of the games where we are going to be put under a lot of pressure and we have to learn and grow and minimise the mistakes and when we get the opportunities we have to make sure that we put that away but it’s about improving,” Ellis explains.
South Africa, who were knocked out in the first round when they played in their maiden World Cup in France in 2018, want to face quality opposition leading up to another footballing showpiece to be staged in about a year’s time.
“Our goal was qualifying for the World Cup and we did that and our goal was winning the Afcon, we did that and so now we have to focus on being at the World Cup and making sure that we strive to be one of the players with the squad selected to play in the World Cup also as a team to do well in the World Cup. So we have swiftly moved away from the celebrations,” says Banyana Banyana co-captain Andile Dlamini.
Banyana Banyana are only ranked 54th in the world but Brazil are not expecting them to be pushovers.
Brazil are the most successful women’s national team in South America, having won the last five editions of Copa America. They have also qualified for every FIFA Women’s World Cup since inception, finishing as runners-up once.
“I know every time we play against an African team it’s really like a physical game, I played against Zambia. We watched the South African national team playing in the Cup of Africa and they have like a really good team, really fast, and really like physical players and it’s always hard to play against African teams. Besides their speed, I think the players are technical, they have a lot of skills similar to what we do have here,” Brazil captain Rafaelle Souza.
The match against Brazil on Friday evening kicks-off at six o’clock. The second match will be played at Durban’s Moses Mabhida Stadium on Monday.
