WOMEN'S FOOTBALL | SPAIN-ENGLAND
Jorge Vilda: "Playing England will make us a better side"
Spain's Women's team's coach said: "We'd prefer to meet these kind of rivals, countries in the top part of the ranking, we don't want easy games"
Raising the bar
Spain's Women's team coach Jorge Vilda looked ahead to tomorrow's friendly match against England in Guadalajara, a friendly to prepare for Euro 2017 in Holland and said it is precisely by playing games against high-level rivals that his team can improve.
"We'll be going out to win because the objective is to reach a good, competitive level. The only way we can do that is by arranging games against the top five women's teams in UEFA's ranking, such as Germany, France, England, Sweden and Norway", Vilda explained today.
"As the team in sixth place in that ranking, we'd prefer to meet any of those top five - teams who start out as favourites against us. We don't want comfortable, easy games, we want to stretch ourselves - test ourselves to the limit so that in the not too distant future, we hope by July, our players will be level with the best players and we will be able to take on and match the top side in Europe and probably the world right now, Germany", he continued.
While much of Spain has been suffering heavy rainfall in the past few weeks, Vilda is happy with how the pitch at the Pedro Escartín Municipal stadium is holding up. "I expected the playing surface to be worse after three days of constant rain but we've trained on it and it's fine. I don't think we will have any problems playing our kind of football on it".