BY FREEMAN MAKOPA
Zimbabwe will host the men and women’s southern African qualifier for the 2021 Hockey Africa Cup of Nations at St Johns’ College in Harare from August 21 to 30.
The men and women’s teams will face southern African countries in a competition in which the top two nations in each category will proceed to next year’s Cup of Nations finals.
Hockey Association of Zimbabwe (Haz) president Grant Campbell said it was an honour for the country to host such an event.
“We are hosting the central and southern African qualifier for Africa Cup of Nations from August 21-30 at St Johns’ College in Harare this is a great honour and will go a long way for Zimbabwean hockey as this is for our national men and women’s teams. This is a great opportunity to showcase Zimbabwe and our expertise in hosting a tournament as we have highly qualified judges,” Campbell said.
“Our hosting of the qualifiers and having other nations coming to Zimbabwe will help in terms of tourism, so we want to utilise the opportunity and we hope to bid for the World Cup. We are therefore, reaching out to the government to support these teams to have proper funding to train for the tournament.”
He said he is hoping the two teams will do well in the qualifiers to book their tickets to the main tournament that will be held next year.
“This is one of the biggest qualifiers we are hosting. It might need us to pull the strings and give our best shots to outclass our opponents. We have the best teams and we expect that they will use the skills they were equipped with during training. All in all, we hope that both teams will qualify then we will see what happens from there,” he said.
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Haz is looking to develop the game further so that they can increase the selection pool.
“We are still doing development in various areas and we also have a large portfolio with regards to junior schools across the board as well,” he added.
