News

Spain currently occupy position 20 in the FIFA World rankings, whereas Northern Ireland are placed 80th, but despite this gap in team performance, NI manager Alfie Wylie is looking forward to the match, "This match will again be fantastic experience for our girls. We all learnt a lot from the match against England last year and we have been working extremely hard on the girls' fitness levels. Indeed the girls are at their highest level of fitness so we have high hopes for the match."

One area of weakness for the NI women is match sharpness. The girls are geographically spread out between America, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and it is therefore difficult to get the girls together for friendly matches in preparation.

However Alfie has been working with the players based in Northern Ireland and the squad played a number of friendly matches in the last few weeks against the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland U18 squad and a County boy's squad.

Alfie has introduced a number of younger players into the squad, three of whom played at U17 level (Demi Vance, Nadine Caldwell and Lisa Armour), "This forthcoming match against Spain is all about developing our players and gaining experience for their future. It's an opportunity for the girls to really work hard and push themselves to achieve as much as they can."

"It's an exciting and unique mixture of players in the squad - from the very experienced, to the three U17 players. The younger players will no doubt learn from the senior players, and develop themselves and their skills."

"The girls have put an enormous amount of effort into improving their fitness and we had an individually designed fitness programme for each of the players which they have been working on over the international break. It was vitally important for the girls to improve in this area as we are now playing a higher level of football against top flight teams."

Stacey Hall will once again pull on the captain's armband. Especially welcome for her first time into the squad is Birmingham City's Amy McCann. Amy qualifies to play for Northern Ireland through her late Grandfather who was born in Portadown. Amy is a regular at Birmingham and has attended a number of training sessions with the NI side.

Squad to play Spain: