World Cup Preparations
Friday, April 30, 2010
We are now just 61 days away from the opening game of the World Cup between South Africa and Mexico. So how do Cameroon plan to use these final two months to prepare the real thing?
Well the Cameroon Football Association has announced that they will hold a camp from April 12-16 in Yaoundé made up of 24 locally based players in a last ditch attempt to find possible new talent worthy of donning the Cameroon shirt in South Africa. It is somewhat doubtful whether any of the 24 men given this chance have a realistic opportunity at winning a place. This late in the game would seem to rule out any actual chance, but it does at least show that Paul Le Guen and is staff are willing to look at a large number of players in an attempt to piece together the best possible squad.
Cameroon will then set up camp in the Parisian suburb of Val d’Oise and train in the Michel Hidalgo Stadium. From France they will then travel to Germany as they begin the run-in to the World Cup with a series of friendlies starting on May 29th against fellow World Cup qualifiers Slovakia. This match will take place in the city of Klagenfurt. Following that on the June 1st they will face Portugal who have also qualified for the World Cup. This match will take place in the Portuguese city of Covilhã. And finally a week before the start of the tournament Cameroon will take part in their final friendly on June 5th against Serbia in Belgrade.
So Cameroon will be facing off against three World Cup teams from Europe. The Cameroon football association has done a top notch job of scheduling friendlies in the build up for the World Cup. They have already done battle with Italy and now get three more World Cup teams. Serbia and Portugal will be hoping that Cameroon serve as a bit of a barometer for their own African opposition of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire respectively meanwhile Slovakia will just be looking to test themselves as they are in a group without African opposition.
The friendlies will be a great test to see how Cameroon handle world class attacking players such Marek Hamšík of Slovakia and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal. And it will be interesting to see if the Cameroon attack can get the better of defenders such as Ricardo Carvalho, Branislav Ivanović and Nemanja Vidić of Serbia.
These friendlies should prepare Cameroon’s 23 man squad for the matches that actually count against Denmark, Japan and The Netherlands starting with Japan June 14 in Bloemfontein. {#}
posted @ 11:59 AM,
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