Head coach of Asante Kotoko, Kjetil Zachariassen, believes Wednesday’s friendly with Ivorian side, Societe Omnisports De L’ Arme at the Baba Yara Stadium, was very helpful in their preparations for their CAF Champions League campaign.
The match ended goalless but it gave Zachariassen the chance to gauge the level of readiness of his players ahead of their clash with Nigerian side Kano Pillars in the preliminary round of the continent’s top club competition.
For the Norwegian, the match served a very useful purpose for him and the players.
“We are as ready as we can be at this stage. You can see that we have been training and today was another chance to play a match after the training. We tried to implement our systems and structures.
I think today we were a little more off than on. There was so much distance between the players but that is adjustable. So, competitive wise the players are there.”
However, there were some things that did not please Zachariassen and he hoped that the team would put these things right going forward.
“A lot of people will say that we played this game without a shot on target but that is not true. The thing is that we controlled the game but we did that in areas that were not needed.
We had the ball a lot of the ball in deep positions instead of playing it forward and the players could not tell me why they were doing that. We will have to work on those things.”
Kotoko face Kano Pillars on the weekend August 9-11 with the second leg set for August 23-25.
