Zifa president Phillip Chiyangwa has challenged the Warriors football team headed for the COSAFA tournament to continue with the fine run that Zimbabwe has enjoyed in the past few months.

The team leaves Wednesday morning for Namibia where they are set to compete for the Southern Africa crown with 14 other nations.

“We are looking forward to more successes at the COSAFA tournament. We want you to win it, my Minister (Makhosini Hlongwane) wants you to win it and the whole of Zimbabwe wants it as well. I have assured them you can do it so please don’t embarrass me.

“You are the same Warriors who qualified for AFCON with a game to spare so we would love that flow to continue even at COSAFA,” said Chiyangwa.  

Chiyangwa visited the Warriors that is dominated by locally-based players at their training session at Hellenics Tuesday morning and addressed both the players and the technical team.

Most of the players in the travelling squad were also involved in the AFCON qualifiers although they did not play a big part.

The Warriors, who start in the preliminary stages because of their poor ranking, are in Group A which also features Swaziland, Seychelles and one of the surprise packages at last year’s tournament, Madagascar.

The winner of the group will meet Zambia in the quarterfinals. Group B contains Malawi, Angola, Lesotho and Mauritius while holders Namibia, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique all got byes and will start at the quarterfinals stage.