Gambia drawn against Guinea in 2015 African Under-17 qualifiers

The Gambia U-17 team

The Gambia U-17 will play host to Guinea in a 2015 African Under-17 Championship first round qualifier in June.

Gambia, two time winners of the U-17 Championship, will play the first leg of the tie in Banjul in the weekend of 13, 14 and 15 June 2014 before travelling to Conakry for the second leg two weeks later.

The winner of the tie will play the 2013 hosts and fourth place finishers Morocco, in the second round of the qualifiers.

Gambia decided to withdraw its Under-17 team for the qualifiers of the 2013 African Under-17 Championship in Morocco, thereby allowing Ghana to progress to the next stage of the qualifiers.

The country was withdrawn from the qualifiers after the then normalization committee felt that a team was unable to be raised in time to face Ghana in September 2012 but the Minister for Youth and Sports Alieu K. Jammeh felt otherwise, explaining that the decision to pull out was to end the trend of using over-aged players to play in previous competitions.

“What we have been seeing over the years is people above Under 17 playing for Under 17 category and we don’t want to continue on that trend,” Jammeh said at the time.

“Gambia has been participating long time just for the sake of participating and we now want to graduate from that. We need to have a purpose for taking part in competitions,” Minister Jammeh added.

According to CAF, mandatory Magnetic Resonance Imaging [MRI] tests will now be used during the qualifying stages of the African U-17 Championship to ensure the accuracy of the ages of players.

The Gambia is one of the most successful teams in the U-17 Championship, winning it twice in 2005 and 2009 but it has since failed to make an appearance in the tournament.

The 2015 African U-17 Championship will be hosted by Niger with four teams qualifying to the 2015 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Chile.