Despite their victory being celebrated, the PNG U16 Women’s Football Head Coach, Rachel Wadunah has some discrepancies with the performance of the team in their OFC Qualifying match against America Samoa yesterday.
Even though the PNG girls recorded a crushing win over the American Samoans with an 8 goals to 2 victory, the coach described their overall match performance as poor and not to her expectation.
“The game plan that I put out for the girls to play did not happen. They did not stick to the plan and follow the simple instructions I gave out; however, I am happy with the girls for winning this game, but their general performance in this game did not turned out the way I wanted it played,” said Wadunah.
She said that they will return to training and improve on those areas lacking from their recent match and hopefully do better in their next match against the Cook Islands U16 Women’s team, who are currently the top team to beat.
The Cook Islands are currently leading the competition and certainly a much tougher opponent for the PNG girls, according to the coach.
“The next match is a very important match for us. Cook Islands are a much better and stronger side, which they showed in their first match against American Samoa. We will get the girls to work hard and improve on areas they lacked in the game for the next two days in training and hope they do well against the Cook Islands,” added the Coach.
The current PNG U16 Women’s team had only 2 weeks of preparation leading up to their OFC Qualifying games and they are still working on putting together combinations and other areas of their game, as most of these young girls in the team are from the District.
According to Wadunah, this current PNG U16 women’s football squad is made up of players from Port Moresby, Lae and Madang.
Based on the performances of the U16 Women’s team, it clearly shows that PNG has a lot of raw and potential talent that needs the right support to help them build their pathway and grow into better players to represent the country.
Wadunah emphasized that the PNG Football Academy program is the way forward to help nurture and develop young raw talents into making a name for themselves in Football.
The Coach concluded by saying that the result shown in match by our U16 Girls’ team yesterday, clearly shows that the Women Football National Teams from the Juniors to the Bilums (Senior Women) are by far doing the country proud by putting on winning performances in any competition they take part in.
This is evidence of good support leading to success and as such, she is calling on the Government, Corporate Bodies and Sporting stakeholders to step in and help support Women Football in the country.
