Beach Soccer: Mozambique makes World Cup debut vs. Spain

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Beach Soccer: Mozambique makes World Cup debut vs. Spain

6:23 CAT | 19 Aug 2021

Photo: O Pais

The national beach football team will face Spain this Thursday in the first round Group B match of the Beach Soccer World Cup, taking place from 19 to 29 August in Russia.

The game starts at 7:00 p.m. local time (6:00 p.m. in Mozambique).

Mozambique’s World Cup beach soccer debut follows on coming second in the African Championship in Dakar, Senegal.

Mozambique’s first game (to be broadcast on DStv’s SS Máximo 360 and GOtv’s SS Football) is against their Spanish counterparts, who are joined in Group B by the United Arab Emirates and Tahiti.

Mozambique won a friendly match against Uruguay on Monday, 2-0.

Before heading to the Luzhniki Olympic Complex for the World Cup, the national beach soccer team completed pre-competition training at the Centro de Alto da Nazaré, Portugal, where they played four warm-up matches.

“The balance is positive, considering our trajectory. First we arrived in Portugal without a single training game. We were effectively going to assess our potential. The day after our arrival in Portugal we played against Portugal, and lost 8-3. From there, we started to work on the aspects of our game that concerned us most and were obvious in the match itself,” team coach Abineiro Ussaca said.

The warm-up matches allowed the national team to gain a competitive rhythm for the World Cup campaign. “Overall, I’m satisfied, because the team has improved a lot – the confidence indexes, the emotional indexes, the technical capacity, tactics, including the physical component. We are all happy, and I believe that were are in good condition for the opening match against Spain,” Ussaca said.

The talent of the Mozambican players is the greatest strength of the ‘Pérola do Índico’ team, which includes Nelson Manuel, ‘Best Player’ of the 2021 African Nations Cup in Dakar, Senegal, where he was also top scorer with a total of 10 goals. Manuek will probably attract of a lot of attention from his opponents.

“Once again, we thank the teachings of our coaches as well as from Portugal, for learning about a new way of playing beach soccer, new methods of facing the game. For us this is a gain, we grew, we improved some tactical and technical aspects for what are the essences of beach soccer and everything will be seen in the World Cup,” Nelson Manuel said about preparations for his debut in Moscow.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with this invaluable opportunity to see our team shine at the Beach Soccer World Cup,” Agnelo Laice, Managing Director of MultiChoice, added, “providing our viewers with a unique experience of broadcasting matches first-hand, with commentary entirely in Portuguese, helping them experience all the emotions of this great championship.”

Other inaugural games are UAE vs Tahiti at 2:00 pm, followed by Paraguay vs Japan at 3:30 pm. After our national team faces the Spaniards, the first day ends with a clash between Russia and the USA at 7:30 pm.

Source: O País