Botswana coach Alex Malete sets minimum target for WAFCON

Botswana women’s national team head coach Alex Malete has revealed the goals his team aims to achieve at the upcoming Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) scheduled to take place in Morocco.

According to Malete, the minimum target his side will accept is to reach the quarter-final stage of the tournament, which is scheduled for July. Botswana are coming off the Three-Nation series tournament, where they lost all their matches against South Africa and Zambia.

“Our target—the minimum result we can accept—is finishing in the quarter-final because that is what we have set for ourselves,” said Malete as quoted by SABC Sports.

“We believe that the lessons we have learned from participating in international friendlies should put us in a position to perform better. I want the players to improve on reading the game and having the correct game management.”

On what to expect from Group B, which has Nigeria, Tunisia and Algeria, Malete said: “We will need to perform well, especially against Tunisia and Algeria – I think that is where the challenge will be, but we also need to pay attention to other teams and see how they perform in their groups.

“We have travelled on this road before, we know exactly what is expected of us.”

Malete concluded: “We created a lot of chances, coupled with some dominance on the ball, but still failed to score. So we want to work on our finishing. Same thing in the Three-Nations – we managed to score against both teams, but still struggled in defence, so we need to reflect and fix our mistakes.”