07 July 2018– Burger-King Sponsored South Africa’s national Under-20 (Amajita) held their first and only training session on Saturday afternoon in Woodlands Stadium, following their arrival in Lusaka on Friday night for the scheduled friendly match against Zambia.
Coach Thabo Senong assembled a 22-man squad in which he stated that he had all the belief in the world that they would do the business against the host on Sunday in Nkoloma Stadium (Kick-off 3pm).
Sunday’s game will serve as both side’s preparations for their upcoming third round first leg 2019 Africa U-20 Cup of Nations qualifiers respectively. South Africa will play Malawi at home in Rustenburg, Moruleng Stadium on July 15th, while Zambia will host Burundi in that first leg meeting.
South Africa’s qualifier match will kick-off at 3pm.
“We’ve selected 22 players for this Zambia match,” Senong said. “The four that we cut will only join us on Monday for our main camp, where we will be preparing for our Under-20 Afcon qualifier against Malawi. The four players who are not here are Keith Groeneveld (from Standard Liege FC, Belgium), midfielder Mfanafikile Dlamini (Golden Arrows), goalkeeper Giovanni Idi (Tuks) and Shungu Dutiro (Bidvest Wits).
“However, over and above that, we are happy with the players that are here,” Senong added. “And we would like to thank their respective clubs for making them available to us. It’s preseason now, however, they (clubs) made sure that we got the players we asked them for. We don’t have a lot of time and so we are working really hard to integrate them into a unit that will do the business for us against Zambia (in Sunday’s friendly).”