Technical director of the senior national football team of Antigua, Piotr Nowak (left), is hoping the Benna Boys can improve its conversion rate when they take on British Virgin Islands (BVI) in a friendly international at the Antigua Recreation Ground (ARG) today, Sunday March 22, 2015. Photo: Provided

Antigua and Barbuda had defeated USVI 2-0 and Dominica 1-0 in recent matches at the ARG.

Nowak said the team spent a considerable amount of time on scoring in training sessions leading into Sunday’s matches.

“I know, as I said, the field is not helping in this process but the guys are trying very hard to put the ball on the ground and really combine and be creative and so on. We had a lot of chances in both games against USVI and Dominica,” he said.

“I thought those teams were just hanging in there and hoped the results would stay (at 2-0 and 1-0) but you have to put those teams away earlier so I think that’s what we are going to work on because the conversion rate is not the greatest so we have to improve this as well,” he added.

Hat-trick of victories being pursued

Nowak said he is also hoping to see improvements in other areas of the team’s play as they seek to make it a hat-trick of victories spanning three weeks.

“The time under pressure, the time on the ball has to be faster and the decision process needs to be faster to pass the ball through the zone so I think we need to improve that as well as continue to play the game on the wings as well so overall, in strategy, there will be no changes but the we worked very hard in the last week after the game against Dominica to recover and then we had a very good couple of days in sessions now so we are going to look at improving on what we had in the last two weeks,” he said.

The recently appointed Technical Director added that the public could see a few new faces in Sunday’s line-up.

“We have a couple of new guys because there were some injuries some players are nursing after the first couple of games so you may see a couple of new faces in the game. Some of the guys also received their passports now so we can introduce them into the international games,” Nowak said.

“The strategy will be the same and we will start to play with the two strikers and now I think we will continue to do that,” he added.

Today’s match will kickoff at 6 pm.