Hope predicts Cameroon test
- Friday,
Great Britain v Cameroon
London 2012 Women's Football
Group E
5.15pm, Saturday 28 July 2012
Millennium Stadium, Cardiff
Live on BBC1
After watching her Team GB side open London 2012 with a narrow 1-0 win over New Zealand on Wednesday, Hope Powell is expecting the second group match, against Cameroon, to be just as tough.
Steph Houghton’s 64th-minute free-kick earned GB all three points against the Kiwis two days before a monumental opening ceremony, while the Africans lost their first game 5-0 to Brazil.
However, Powell is taking nothing for granted and has warned her team to be at their best from the off.
“They are very, very aggressive, very, very quick [and] very direct,” said Powell of Saturday’s opponents.
“It will not be an easy game for us. They have pace in every department which we will have to contend with. They somewhat play off the cuff. They rely heavily on pace, they are very powerful [and] very physical. So we will have to be at the races from the time the whistle blows right to the end.
“Every game we play we go out with the ambition to win the game and this will be no different. If we win the game, we’ll be on six points which puts us in a really strong position. New Zealand play Brazil and they have got to get something out of that game [so] it’s all to play for, but our focus is just to try and win the game.”
Team GB go into the Millennium Stadium encounter on the back of extensive media coverage of their first game. Pictures of Houghton’s celebrations were splashed across the front and back pages of most newspapers on Thursday morning and the Head Coach believes women’s football has never been so popular.
“It was fantastic,” she said of the coverage. “We laid all the papers out for the girls at breakfast. That is unprecedented, we have never experienced that before. Front page, back page, middle page. It’s, as the Americans would say, ‘awesome’.”
