Jawichre upbeat as Chipu depart for World U20 Trophy fiesta

The team has been training hard for the past three weeks and head coach Simon Jawichre says they are fired up ahead of their second successive appearance in the World U20 trophy.

Kenya, who are the reigning African U20 champions are in Pool B alongside Uruguay, USA and Netherlands.

“The training and preparations have been good. It’s important that we’ve been in camp for over three weeks now, it helps the guys to be up to speed. It’s like when you’re revising for an exam, you put in the work, we’ve really if I may say revised and the boys are mentally in shape and I believe even physically we are in the best possible shape.”

Jawichre, who will be in charge of the team for his second assignment after a successful hunt in the Barthes Cup, says the squad has the necessary depth and experience to shine in the competition.

“The boys know where the problems were last year and it's easy for them now to look back and say this is the kind of level of competition we were at and what they need to do to compete properly, they understand what it takes to compete at that level.

“They’ve also been able to impact the same on the younger guys; last year we shipped in quite a number of scores so we are able to shut down where the issues were.”

The former Catholic Monks Director of Sports has a strategy to improve on last year’s results.

“Our target is to post better results so that comes with our training and our skill level in terms of not just the individual brilliance but the unit; we believe we should be defending better; we should be scoring better.

“So the general result we are saying for example in our pool we are four, the worst we can do is one loss but again one game at a time and for now we are focused on Uruguay.”