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Sydney 2010
Sydney Teams To Provide Tough Tests For Young Ferns
by Jeremy Ruane
The Young Ferns flew out of Auckland on Friday for a week-long school holidays visit to Sydney, where they will play three demanding matches in five days as they step up their preparations for the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup Finals in September.
While NZ Football’s resources and attentions have been drawn very much towards the All Whites during their recent World Cup campaign, Young Ferns coach Dave Edmondson has quietly gone about securing some international opportunities for his charges, their first fixtures since clinching their tickets for Trinidad & Tobago in April.
Two fixtures against the New South Wales Institute of Sport, followed by a clash with reigning W-League champions Sydney FC, will provide the Young Ferns with the stern opposition they need ahead of Finals fixtures against Venezuela, newly crowned European champions Spain and Japan in September.
The two encounters against NSWIS take place on Sunday and Tuesday at Valentine Sports Park, while the duel with Sydney is scheduled for Thursday, with the squad returning home twenty-four hours later.
The Katie Bowen-captained Young Ferns squad will also be Sydney FC’s guests on Sunday evening, as the club’s reigning A-League champions take on Everton in a glamour pre-season friendly at ANZ Stadium.
Edmondson has chosen an eighteen-strong squad for the three-match tour, which has among its objectives the development of combinations and playing in both a foreign environment and a pressurised situation, something which their Australian opponents will certainly provide during the coming week.
The squad, some of whom are making their first-ever trip abroad, is largely based on the group which secured New Zealand’s passage to Trinidad & Tobago in such spectacular fashion in April, when they rattled home 37 goals in their three qualifying group fixtures against the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
Brittany Dudley-Smith, Min Khanthee and Steph Skilton are the three players from that selection who were overlooked on this occasion, while some impressive displays for Metro have seen Michelle Windsor earn a recall after she was omitted from the Oceania U-17 Women’s Championship-winning squad.
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She will be hoping to force her way back into Edmondson’s thinking before he finally settles on his 23-strong squad for Trinidad & Tobago, a group which must be named in the not-too-distant future, given the Young Ferns’ opening match in Couva is less than sixty days away.
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