14 Feb 2024

The Botswana women’s national football team, The Mares will depart for Turkey on Sunday where they will prepare for the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) finals to be held in Morocco later this year.

While in Turkey, The Mares will play friendly games against Belarus, Slovenia and Russia or Azerbaijan.

The team coach Alex Malete said in an interview that the Turkey training camp would help them prepare intensively for the finals more so that they would be based in a different environment and concentration levels would be high.

He said the technical team would use the friendlies to give each and every player chance.

“This is the time to give all the players we have been calling for camps a chance as some haven’t been making it to the first team,” he said.

Again, he said they would use the friendly games to gauge players’ performance.

All the teams they would be playing against during their training camp, he said were ranked higher than the best teams in Africa adding that their technical ability was high.

And as such, he said what they would benefit from the training camp was the game approach.

He said the same game approach the teams would be using at the camp would be used at the WAFCON finals, hence it was important that all the players had a clear picture of the tactics that the team would apply in Morocco.

“The Turkey camp will be our second camp.

In the first camp, which took three days, we called 35 local players for assessment,” he said.

Malete said the camp would also help them during the final team selection as they would have given all the players a fair chance of assessment.

He said Balotlhanyi Johannes, Refilwe Tholakelo and Masego Montsho would not be part of the Turkey training camp due to various reasons.

He said they had roped in some youthful players from Under 20 amongst them Jessica Modise, Precious Tlhapi and Desiree Kenyaditswe. Ends