Ellis wants a better performance from Banyana against Australia

Going into their international friendly with Australia on Saturday, Banyana Banyana coach Desiree Ellis wants to see a better performance from her charges than she saw when the team played Brazil recently. 

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Banyana are set to take on Fifa Women’s World Cup co-host Australia at the Kingsmeadow Stadium in London.

Ellis says everything looks good with the team at the moment, especially after their training session on Thursday, and the players are looking ready for the game, and have been working on fixing some of the mistakes they made against Brazil. 

“I think the session went well, we worked on a few things we need to be better at. The players looked very sharp (at training),” said Ellis.

“We have one more session (on Friday) which is match-day minus one at the stadium, and we are really looking forward to going there … we want to be better than what we were against Brazil.

“There are lots of things that we worked on in a very short space of time, unfortunately we couldn’t work on everything but defensively we have to be a little bit more organised.

“We have to make sure that we cover each other and we minimise our mistakes. When we are on the ball we need to do better, our decision making needs to be better.”

The Banyana coach added that another huge aspect the team needs to fix is to be clinical upfront when presented with goalscoring chances, especially at a high level where top teams take advantage of half chances to win games.

“And in the final third when we get the opportunity we need to take it because it has been shown in this level that you miss an opportunity and the next moment the ball is in the back of your net.

“We are looking for an improved performance … compared to the showing against Brazil because we know we are better than that,” Ellis concluded.