SA U17 Women gear up for World Cup qualifier clash against Gabon

The two nations clash on Saturday in the first leg away in Franceville, with the return fixture expected in a fortnight.

The South Africans assembled for their training camp on Sunday and have already departed for the Central African country.

Khumalo called up the bulk of the squad that played in the COSAFA U17 Women’s Championship played in December last year, and believes they stand a good chance of victory.

"We have a chance because as I said my team is very strong. We also fixed our challenges in the goalkeeping department, defensive, offensive, that was a challenge to convert goals, those were the things that we worked on,” Khumalo said.

“Although it's not easy to say because sometimes to implement something in football it needs more time but with the game that we played against boys, some of the things were positive, players were responding very well tactically in terms of finishing and how to defend those set pieces."

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Khumalo says they go into the match against Gabon at the back of some vital lessons learnt from the COSAFA Cup where they bombed out in the group stages.

"The lessons that I learnt from COSAFA is that you need to understand chances that you create to be more on converting goals because if you create no chances, you don't score. In COSAFA most teams that are playing there are using set pieces and long balls, so you need to know how to defend all those things and also to prepare the mind of the players,” the coach added.

“It's very important to start the tournament with the same focus to try to help them because remember the game that we were playing, the last group game, it was a final one and I think we failed to help them to be more focused in a serious stage of the tournament.

“Maybe they were under pressure so we were busy working on those things so that in game situations [we know that] we need to win but we're don't need to put ourselves under pressure, we need to do things and be patient in everything that we do."