By Bockarie Allieu –
Sierra Leone U-20 Shooting Stars technical team Mohamed Lamin Kamara last week invited 50 youth male players to start training for the AFCON 2025 tournament in Ivory Coast.
The training started on Monday 20 January at the SLFA Academy field, Kingtom in Freetown. Mohamed Lamin Kamara made a history to be the first coach to qualify Sierra Leone for the U-20 AFCON tournament.
According to him, the above training is part of the preparation for the 2025 TotalEnergies U-20 Africa Cup of Nations, which is schedule to start on 26th April 2025 to the 18th May 2025.
The U-20 AFCON Tournament is part way to the FIFA U-20 World Cup in Chile. According to the tournament procedure, the top four countries in the U-20 AFCON Tournament will get an automatic qualification for the Global U-20 competition in Chile.
Coach Mohamed Lamin Kamara and his back room staffs are confident of making another history to qualify the team for the Global tournament.
By so doing, he said they are going to work hard to build a strong and determine team that they will take to Ivory Coast.
The Sierra Leone U-20 National team defeated Gambia in the WAFU U20 Zonal qualifier 3-0 last year at the Samuel K Doe Stadium in Liberia.
The above victory qualifies them for the WAFU U-20 final and a place in the AFCON U-20 tournament in Ivory Coast this year. In the WAFU U-20 competition, they drew their first match 0-0 against Guinea, they defeated Liberia 3-1, beat Guinea Bissau 0-1,defeated Gambia 3-0 and lost the final match 2-0 to Senegal but the two countries qualifies for the U-20 AFCON tournament.
Meanwhile, they will be including some foreign base players to get a formidable team for the tournament. But for now, they are training with 50 home base players and as time goes on, they will drop some players until they get the required number of players for the tournament.
