October 5, 2021
The Sierra Leone Senior National Football Team (Leone Stars) has held its first training session on 4th October 2021 at the Royal Golf Center in Jadida, Morocco ahead of 3 lined up international friendlies against South Sudan, The Gambia and Morocco – on the 6th, 9th and 12th October 2021, respectively.
The team trained with 14 players at the Royal Golf Center as they await the other players to arrive.
They include – Seven (7) home based players – Mahmoud Fofana, Ibrahim Sesay, Yeami Dunia, Mohamed N. Kamara, Saidu Fofana, Abubakarr Samura and Saidu Mansaray;
Seven (7) foreign based players – Alusine Koroma, Alhassan Koroma, Sulaiman Kaikai, Kwame Quee, Osman Kakay, Augustus Kargbo, and David Sesay (from Barnet FC England), who is getting his first call-up to the Leone Stars team.
According to John Keister the head coach of Leone Stars
“We are taking with us 30 players for the first time and it is more important because we want to identify players going November when we are going to have our final Friendlies matches.”
He added that we are playing against South Sudan, the Gambia, and Morocco strong opposition teams who are more physical looking at team in the group E where we are we have strong teams like Ivory coast and that is the essence of these Friendlies matches, we are not much concerned with results we just want to identify players, but again we are going to be more competitive because we have north African teams like Morocco in our group.
He affirmed that there are some players who have to change Association and there are some players who are yet to get a competitive match with the national team Leone Stars and the technical team want to see the physical fitness of the players before the AFCON.
The Assistant Head Coach 1 Amidu Karim gave his reactions after Leone Stars first training session said
“The essence of these friendlies is to look out for more players for the upcoming AFCON finals, especially those who did not take part in the qualifying stage.”
“We have been at the AFCON twice before, but we want to make a difference this time by going beyond the group stage, onto the finals,” he said.
Coach Karim is also satisfied with his boys,” The boys are mentally and physically fit during the start of the training. We are looking forward to receive more players from both home and abroad,” he said.
Seven (7) more players will jet in today from abroad and 4 players from home (Sierra Leone) including Abdul Razak Conteh who has been drafted in to replace injured Kelvin Wright who picked up a late injury at his club.