Tough Japan tour also a fruitful one

The Bangladesh U-16 women's football team will be back to business today following their Eid vacation after a week-long trip to Japan as part of their preparation for the AFC U-16 Women's Championship to be held in Thailand in September.

The U-16 girls, who shot to national fame after qualifying for the finals of the AFC U-16 Women's Championship last year, have been travelling to different Asian countries to prepare for the final challenge in Thailand where Bangladesh will play against North Korea, Japan and Australia in the eight-team event.

The girls have already visited Japan, China and Singapore and they are supposed to travel to South Korea and Vietnam before September's finals. They returned hours before Eid-ul-Fitr on the night of June 25 night from Japan, where they suffered defeats in the first two practice matches before notching up a consolation win in the last game. The girls had also participated in a football festival in Japan earlier this year.

“Our aim to visit Japan was accomplished as we trained intensively and rectified mistakes made in practice matches. We had also experimented with formation, positional changes of the players in all three 90-minute matches and the girls improved match by match,” said coach Golam Rabbani Choton yesterday.

Choton explained the thinking behind the players' positional changes as well as the formation as Bangladesh are going to face the strongest opponents in the final round of the AFC U-16 Women's Championship. 

“Our players are generally used to playing in a single position but this time we tried to play them in different positions. Sanjida [Akter] used to play in right-forward but she played in right-back to right-attack in Japan. Striker Krishna [Rani Sarker] played as the midfielder. Central-back Akhi Khatun played as midfielder,” explained Choton. “We wanted to see whether the players could play the positions they are not used to. Now we know who can play and who can't play in different positions and we can use them in future if needed.”

Having lost the first match 2-4 to Sakai Academy U-18, Choton's charges played in a 3-4-3 formation in the second match against the Sakai U-16 team but they suffered a 5-0 defeat to the home team, who also handed an 8-0 defeat to the visiting China U-16 team at the Sakai Football Academy ground.

They then notched a 3-1 win in their third and final match against the Seisho High School U-18 team.

“We played against the team whose national women's team were world champions, so the standard of Japanese age-level teams are much, much better than Bangladesh.

“Due to [striker Sirat Jahan] Swapna's absence, who sustained an injury during the first match, our attacking lineup was weakened and our backline was put under pressure. So, we had to negotiate with the forwards of the opponents, but we fought toe-to-toe throughout the match,” Choton added.