Serengeti Boys leave for Morocco
NATIONAL U17 soccer team, Serengeti Boys, is expected to travel to Morocco today for a training camp to prepare for the U17 African Nations Cup finals that will be hosted by Gabon in May.
Serengeti Boys
The team, made up of 23 players and eight officials, will leave for Morocco in the evening aboard the Emirates flight, as disclosed by Tanzania Football Federation (TFF) information officer Alfred Lucas.
Serengeti Boys had been training from January 29 and also took part in three international friendly games. They took on Burundi in two matches played in Kagera on March 30 and April 1, in which the former won 3-0 in the first and, then, cruised to a 2-0 win in the second.
Serengeti Boys hosted Ghana U17 team at the National Stadium in Dar es Salaam on Monday, with the game ending in a 2-2 draw. Lucas said Serengeti Boys will go for a one-month training camp in Morocco and the team will, as well, play at least two international friendly matches against Morocco U17 team and either Tunisia or Egypt.
The Morocco camp, as revealed by the TFF official, will end on May 1. Serengeti Boys will later head to Cameroon to play two international friendly games against Cameroon U17 team on May 3 and 6. The Tanzanian outfit will then leave for Gabon on May 7 for the U17 African Nations Cup finals, in which the team has been put into group B with Mali, Niger and Angola.
The international friendly game against Cameroon, the TFF official said, will be a good opportunity for Serengeti Boys’ coaches to assess the weaknesses and strengths of their players, given the two countries have been performing well in junior competitions in the continent. Cameroon have been placed in group A in the U17 African Nations Cup finals with Guinea, Ghana and hosts, Gabon.
The U17 African Nations Cup finals’ semi-finalists will book a place in the FIFA U17 World Cup finals which will take place in Mumbai, India in November. Meanwhile, Kagera Sugar striker, Mbaraka Yusuph, has won the 2016/2017 Mainland Premier League best player award for March.
Yusuph, who also features for the senior national soccer team ‘Taifa Stars’, beat Azam FC’s Salum Abubakary and Mbeya City’s Kenny Ali to the honour after putting impressive showing for his team during the month.
Mbaraka, who featured in all 90 minutes of Kagera Sugar’s game in the month, helped the squad win three points which saw the outfit stay in the fourth position in the league’s standing. He scored one goal in the game. He will, for that matter, receive 1,000,000/- from the league’s main sponsors, Vodacom Tanzania PLC.
IPP
