The Gambia national U-17 team will leave Cairo for Kigali tomorrow at the end of a two-week training camp in Egypt in preparation for the Caf U-17 cadet championship set to kick off in Rwanda on Saturday.
The Baby Scorpions will be heading to Rwanda in the early hours of Thursday morning as they are set to begin the defence of their title with a game against Congo on January 9.
Seedy Kinteh, president of the Gambia Football Association, has confirmed to our reporter that the two-time Africa champions will leave their training camp in Cairo for their base in Kigali.
He disclosed to Pointsport that the team will arrive in Rwanda at around 12.00 noon.
Kinteh, who remained confident of The Gambia’s chances of defending the crown, told our reporter that despite the conduction of the much-talked about MRI test on the Gambian players in Egypt, the Baby Scorpions’ chances of replicating their historic performance in Algiers two years ago are great.
Thirty-one players of The Gambia’s U-17 team underwent the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Test but a bad news was reported in the week when coach Lamin Sambou and his coaching staff released the final 18-man squad without two most valuable players in the person of Fabakary Bojang and Lamin Gibba.
The absence of the team’s duo will affect the team’s chances of making an impact after strings of impressive qualifying rounds performances by the two big casualties.
The Baby Scorpions, as they are popularly called, who won the U-17 title in 2005 and 2009, will meet Mali in the second match of Group B fixtures on January 12 before wrapping up their group fixtures with a game against fellow West African counterparts and familiar opponents Ivory Coast on January 15.