New Zealand U-17 Women’s Head Coach Leon Birnie is calling for cool heads as his team looks to make history at the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup in Uruguay.

The OFC champions, who made headlines on Wednesday when they defeated Finland 1-0 in Montevideo, will look to back up that performance tomorrow when they take on the hosts Uruguay at the same venue.

New Zealand have appeared at every edition of FIFA’s youngest female tournament, but they have yet to progress to the knockout stage.

Birnie said it is hard to know what they will face when they arrive at the Estadio Charrúa as the home team fights to stay in the tournament.

“We have spoken about the atmosphere, but being in it, is completely different,” said Birnie. “We don’t know what it will be like until we get there. We have done everything we can to talk through what to expect and explain some scenarios. This is a football-mad country and there was 9,500 fans the other night when they played Ghana – these girls haven’t experienced an atmosphere like that before.”

The young Football Ferns got off to an ideal start when a stunning goal from Kelli Brown was enough to earn them three points against Finland, and now they have a great chance of advancing to the knockout stage.

Birnie is expecting a completely different challenge from Uruguay compared to their opening game against Finland.

“Finland are a really structured team whereas Uruguay have much more flair and some individual players who are going to create things. We are going to have to be very good defensively one-on-one.”

The coach is not reading much into the 5-0 drubbing the home team suffered in their opening game against Ghana. He said that will count for little with their tournament on the line. 

“Don’t even worry about that 5-0 result against Ghana. Ghana just blew them away and that is something that we didn’t expect. Uruguay are a much better side than that. For us we are totally focused on this game and we had to bring the girls back down to earth.

“We let them have their moment that night because it is a special moment [winning at a World Cup]. But now we have to make sure they are focused on this game because if we aren’t, we won’t get the result we want.”  

The FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup is live on SKY Sport with the Uruguay versus New Zealand game kicking off tomorrow on SKY Sport 4 at 11am.

FIFA U-17 World Cup – New Zealand’s fixtures (all NZT, live on SKY Sport)
Uruguay v New Zealand, Estadio Charrúa, Montevideo
Saturday 17 November 11am

Ghana v New Zealand, Estadio Charrúa, Montevideo
Wednesday 21 November at 9am

Article added: Friday 16 November 2018