Confirmed by FIFA. Low-quality opponents so we should send a heavily rotated squad of youngsters. Malawi have some good players (the Chawingas and Faith Chinzimu) but the rest are crap. Can imagine the girls will enjoy seeing a country they’ve never seen before as we play in Kenya.
All the games will be held at the Nyayo National Stadium in Nairobi but neither Football Australia nor the Matildas have announced anything yet, and ideally we should be testing ourselves against tougher opposition as opposed to getting routs which could easily reach double-digit scorelines.
Oops my bad I thought it was in Malawi.
In a rebuilding phase this type of tournament is ideal.
The Matildas should be building on the foundations that got us to the Women's Asian Cup final and going one step further at the 2027 Women's World Cup rather than just notching up easy wins against minnows though.
We’ve never played India in an Asian Cup/Olympic/World Cup qualifier?
Such is the gulf in quality between the Matildas and India, we have never played them before because they've either never made it to the stage of major tournament qualification where they would face us or the Tillies have never been drawn in the same group as India, at least at senior level.
Very good point.
Be interesting to see the squad selection. Definitely a chance to blood some new players, so will be curious to see how he goes with that.
We really do need to select a B side essentially. These are incredibly easy games.
Totally agree that we need to be giving plenty of debuts to new players and sending a second-string side for these matches as it will essentially be a bye week for our key players with how easy these games are going to be.
I won't be surprised if most, if not all of the playing list that goes over there in the April international window consists of fringe players given that we will want to rest the marquee players and some of them may well end up becoming mainstays in the Matildas setup in the future.
Depends on the player. At Sydney FC or formerly at Sydney FC players like Mackenzie Hawkesby, Sarah Hunter and Princess Ibini have been capped once or more but I doubt they’ll come back. Surprised Princess isn’t playing for Nigeria, I guess their attack is strong already though. Charlotte McLean has never been capped or even called up but I can’t see it happening unless she’s really good when she plays for us again.
Your reference to ‘players as young as 16’ I find strange, we have age group Matildas tournaments for testing young up and coming players.
Was referring to senior football. We capped Ellie Carpenter at 15 for example. We don’t really do that anymore though, those players only get capped for the youth teams.
But we now have squads for all age levels which is a much better way to give talented players a chance to compete at that level. We don’t need to rush them straight into the full Matildas squads.