Banyana Banyana commenced the 2022 COSAFA Women’s Championship group stage with a 3-0 win over Angola at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium on Wednesday afternoon.
The victory saw South Africa collect the much-needed three points to increase their chances to advance to the next round of the tournament, thanks to goals from Refiloe Maseko, Sphumelele Shamase, and Lithemba Sam-Sam.
Simphiwe Dludlu’s charges should have won the showpiece by a higher margin, given the number of chances they wasted in the final third.
“I think I need to commend SAFA for making sure that there’s a women’s league that takes place week in and week out because these players didn’t have no time to give them tactics and all of that. I’m really thankful to their coaches cause they have given me players that are match fit and coachable as that’s the most important thing. But it’s still going to be hard for us going forward because we have set the bar that this is exactly how we want to play and we will take it one country at a time and keep it simple for ourselves because these are young players that are below the age of 25,” said coach Dludlu in a post-match interview.
“There are 16-year-olds that have come to the field as we just want to give them a chance to play and express themselves.
“Before the game, I told them please don’t look at the number, don’t look at the face, just look at the colour of your socks and t-shirt, you will find that is your teammate. As I said, I’m happy they are a coachable bunch of players that understand their assignment and that we just need to keep it simple.
“Another team would have said that we are in charge of the game let’s just play anyhow but we still kept discipline because at the end of the day we want to make sure that we represent the same brand of football that coach Desiree if she was here she was going to be presenting to us.
“But, there are certain elements that I would like to see us improve, like how we take our set pieces, how we can be creative, and how we can convert our chances because sometimes you get a team that’s too defensive and you don’t get open chances and we will need set pieces to come up for us. However, we will take it one game at a time.”
Meanwhile, Busisiwe Ndimeni walked away with the Women’s Championships Player of the Match accolade.
Banyana will play their next group stage encounter against Mauritius on Saturday, September 2022.
