Banyana Banyana coach Desiree Ellis will field her best 11 players against Uganda in the semifinals of the Cosafa Women’s Championships at Kwazakhele’s Wolfson Stadium on Thursday (3.30pm).
Ellis, 50, had been rotating players in matches in the tournament and made six changes for their final group game against Malawi.
Banyana progressed to the next stage of the tournament after topping Group A with nine points (three matches).
They beat Madagascar 2-1 in their opener, then edged Botswana 1-0.
On Monday, the national side overpowered Malawi 6-0 to book themselves a spot in the semis.
“You come to a tournament with a squad and it doesn’t make sense not to play everyone,” the former Banyana midfielder said.
“We want to make sure we play everyone.
“It’s important that we give players any opportunity to play.
“If they haven’t played a game you are not going to have the best out of them.
“But it also makes our pool bigger and we are very happy for that.
“The reason we have also given players an opportunity is to see what they have to offer [so that] we will select the best possible 11 we feel [are] good enough.
“We wanted to see everyone playing so that we can decide: ‘This is the starting 11 we will use in the semifinals.’
“We don’t want to underestimate anyone. People expected us to play Zimbabwe and look what happened.
“We don’t want to be in a position where we underestimate at our own peril.”
The coach said they had enough footage to analyse Uganda, but would also concentrate on what they need to do as a team.
“Sometimes you analyse the opponent but you don’t concentrate on your own team.
“We believe if we can concentrate on our team as well, once we have analysed the opponent, we will get the result we want.”
Ellis said she was pleased with her girls’ performance.
“We didn’t start the tournament that well in terms of how we wanted to play, but we always knew we had a performance like this in us.
“We just kept working hard at training each and every day.
“We know what we are capable of and on Monday we not only [played] the way we wanted to play, but we also kept the game at a high tempo.
“We created more opportunities and scored a lot of goals.
“We are always looking at improving, but I am very happy with the performance and the results so far.”