The mission is to have a successful tournament when we go into the AFC Women’s Asian Cup: Thomas Dennerby
With around four
months to go for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup, the Indian Women’s Team is hard at
work, first in Jamshedpur, and now in Dubai, UAE, training under new head coach
Thomas Dennerby, as they prepare for their upcoming friendly against the UAE
Women’s Team on Saturday, October 2, 2021.
The Indian
Women’s Team will be playing two friendlies against the UAE National Team, and
the Tunisian National Team. The team spent a month in Jamshedpur where they
trained with infrastructural and logistical help from the Government of
Jharkhand, going through 12 rigorous sessions a week.
“Back in my home in Sweden, women’s football is huge. In Nigeria, where I’ve also coached, football is like a religion. But here in India, the popularity is perhaps not as much as that. But that is also one of the exciting parts about the job for me,” he beamed. “If we have a successful tournament, it could be huge for India. And if you look at the game, in terms of the physical and tactical parts, I must say that we have a lot of players that can play at a very high level.”
“My philosophy is simple. When it comes to defending, our team has to be organised. Every player has to know exactly what they need to do. We want the team to be compact and we are working on that. And then we also want to this compact team to win the ball back, and when we do that, of course, sometimes we want to counter attack quickly, and sometimes we want to slow it down and play around with the ball,” he explained.