Flames Head Coach Kalisto Pasuwa engaged with the media on the Flames’ recent outings in CHAN and COSAFA Cup Competitions.

Here are the extracts from the Press Conference:

Opening statement

“We have played CHAN, and we went also to play COSAFA. Yeah, as coaches, we are very professional enough. We are building a team that will qualify for AFCON 2027 so in building up a team, you, at times, also go into risk mode, where you you need to see each and every player playing in the in the international team, and also one area which I thought we should be able to know, also the times when we are building a team, we look also on edge. Say, Yes, we know outside this, we might need instant results of saying, maybe if you take an experienced player, we can get a result”,

On dropping some senior players for COSAFA

“We need to take into mind to say we need youngsters who can be the next, future players of our national team. And I thought maybe we had most of them in the CHAN squad who played well, very positive in terms of the way they were playing out of position and also in position and playing structured football, where, mostly, if you saw, maybe in our last games, also that we were playing at times, We end up conceding,”

“And maybe it was a surprise also to see some of the guys, like Alick Lungu, not in the part of the squad that we took, and we also had Lloyd not part of it. People should understand that Lungu and Aaron were already spotted, and these are our regulars on our senior team,”

On his approach at COSAFA and overall analysis of his team’s performance

“We went to compete, and unfortunately, we couldn’t win the games or even to score a goal. But remember, we said we trying to build a team, I can easily say now I have players who can be part of the squad to be playing in our next games, and those are some of the positives, and also the experienced that i know i saw maybe in these guys playing, remember, we played with solid teams to an extent, extent of the other coaches, especially of Angola, coming to me, asking me to say, how many players plays in Europe, but we have got only players who are playing locally here. They were even saying they were playing in Europe. So it’s its positives in terms of how these boys fade. It’s only maybe we didn’t get goals,”

You saw these guys have been playing very well. It’s only we are considering from corner kicks, we are considering from free kicks. So we need to work on that so that we can go forward nationality,”