The Brave Warriors finally arrived in Gambia just after midnight on Friday morning. They received a courteous welcome with officials from the Gambian Football Association meeting them at Banjul International Airport and then whisking them through customs where they boarded a bus to Palm Beach Hotel. The bus, accompanied by security guards on motorbikes and vehicles with wailing sirens, sped through Banjul and although it was already past midnight, hordes of people were still on the streets, waving enthusiastically at the passing cavalcade.
At the hotel the Brave Warriors were once again given a courteous and brisk welcome and the players were soon in their hotel rooms shortly after 01h00.
The reception was certainly better than expected and a welcome change to the hours of waiting at Accra International Airport for the flight to Gambia. There, the Namibian delegation arrived shortly after 16h00 and well in advance for its flight to Gambia, which was scheduled to depart at 20h35.
Here, the players had to go through at least five check points for customs and passport controls and to check in for their flight and eventually at about 19h00 they made it to the transit lounge.
After another hour of endless waiting it was announced that their Air Nigeria flight had been delayed and would only arrive an hour later.
By this time coach Tom Saintfiet was clearly irritated since his players had not eaten for six hours and team manager Tim Isaacs managed to buy some take away burgers for the players.
Luckily the wait was nearly over as the Air Nigeria flight arrived soon after and the Namibian delegation boarded we the plane shortly after 21h00.
On Friday morning the players gathered in the dining room for breakfast where they met up with Namibia’s five foreign based players, who had arrived a day earlier in Gambia. Collin Benjamin, Oliver and Wilko Risser arrived from Germany while Henrico Botes and Tangeni Shipahu arrived from South Africa.
All the players were in high spirits and looking forward to the match.
“I don’t know much about Gambia, but we came here with a purpose, to qualify for 2012 so it doesn’t matter who we play or where we play. We came here to get a good result and hopefully on Saturday we can achieve that,” Botes said.
“The team looks good and we’ve got good players. I don’t know anything about Gambia but they also don’t know anything about me or our team so I think we can look forward with confidence to Saturday’s game,” Shipahu said.
The Brave Warriors had one training session scheduled for Friday afternoon before the match on Saturday afternoon.