Namibia’s junior men’s and women’s hockey teams will embark on their Junior World Cup journeys when they fly out to India and Chile this weekend.
Namibia’s men will compete in the Junior Men’s World Cup in Chennai and Madurai from 28 November to 10 December, while Namibia’s women will compete in the Junior Women’s World Cup in Santiago from 1 to 13 December.
The men’s team completed their local training with a convincing 7-1 victory against a select senior men’s team on Tuesday evening, and assistant coach Randy Slabbert says they are well prepared and looking forward to the challenge.
“We’re feeling very excited. We worked extremely hard to first of all qualify for the world cup, and since then we have really been putting in the hard yards.
“We’ve been in the gym at 05h30 three times a week, we’ve had two two-hour sessions twice a week, and we’ve played two matches twice a week against the local players.
“Then we still have quite a few players in South Africa and one in Ireland, but we will catch up with them in Joburg and on the way to India,” he says.
Slabbert says they will play two warm-up matches in India against Malaysia and Canada, before the tournament starts next week, with Namibia drawn against Belgium, Egypt and Spain.
“Our first game is against Belgium who are ranked seventh in the world. We’ve been doing a lot of video assessments of the opposition, so we are going to come up with a game plan to try and counter their game, but at the same time, we also want to play our own game and enforce our game on them,” he says.
“Our second game will be against Egypt, so it will be an all-African affair. We beat them for the first time here in Windhoek at the Africa Qualifier, so we are expecting a tough match from both sides because its almost like a winner-takes-all situation.
“Our last pool game will be against Spain, currently ranked number four in the world, while they are also the European champions.
“That will probably be our toughest match, but we are analysing their game to see how best we can counter it,” he says.
Slabbert says they are aiming for a top-15 finish at the 24-nation tournament.
“Our aim is to finish in the top three in our pool, which will then hopefully qualify us for the top 15 places at the tournament. We would like to finish in the top 15 out of 24 nations, which I think would be a significant achievement at Namibia’s first field hockey world cup.”
Slabbert says they had received lots of supportive messages and encourages the public to continue sending them.
“The support we’ve received from the Namibian public has been great. The Namibian government has assisted us with funding, but the players have also done a number of fundraising initiatives.
“The public at large has supported us very well, which enabled us to collect sufficient funds. We really appreciate their support and we encourage them to watch our matches and continue supporting us,” he says.
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