Online Reporter
Petros Kausiyo in LONDON, England
KAITANO Tembo has defended his use of rookie players.
He maintains he would not shy away from doing so in tournaments whose objective is for teams to build a solid foundation for major international competitions.
The Warriors lost 0-2 to Nigeria in the Unity Cup semi-finals in London.
Some of the Warriors players, like Marley Tavaziva, Marvelous Nakamba and Tawanda Chirewa, have hardly seen game time at club level.
“It is important for us to have an idea of the young players that we have.
“We need to create a huge database in terms of profiling players for the national team because we have situations where players get injured and we need to have an idea of who is going to replace who.
“Jalai came in late because his league in South Africa finished late and I thought Sean Fusire, who hasn’t really played a full game for the Warriors, did very well at right back in the 90 minutes.
“So, we now know that we can have Sean as an option at right back’’. He was also impressed by the qualities he saw in Shane Marodza and Jonah Fabisch, despite the game ending on a losing cause.
“I was also quite impressed with Shane Marodza. He hasn’t really played for the national team but I liked his physique, his aggression and his technique on the ball in our build-up moments, so those are the things we need to try and look at.
“I thought only offensively do we need to try and get more options apart from Maswanhise, who could not be here for other reasons I cannot disclose but which are understandable.
“These games are quite important and players like Abubakar need to quickly adapt because games at this level are much quicker, as well as Mongameli Tshuma, he needs to use his technique to try and create space and in terms of his physical contact.”
He added:
“We played against a team that was probably well prepared physically. They were better in terms of that,’’ said Tembo.
“I think we had moments but our moments, we didn’t really maintain them especially our physical intensity in our press where we didn’t press them consistently. At some point, we were forced to drop off and I thought that had to do with our physical condition.
“If you look at it, most of their players are playing in the championship and some of them are playing in Europe so they just finished now, whereas some our players had already finished’’.
The Warriors were still trooping in on the eve of the match with the likes of Emmanuel Jalai, Jordan Zemura and Daniel Msendami arriving just hours before the match.
“For us, logistically, it was always going to be a challenge in terms of getting players here because of other matters like visas but nevertheless I thought our boys really fared well.”
Mathew Masinge