Nigeria\u2019s national women\u2019s U-18 handball team\u2019s left-back, Taiwo Babatunde, has attributed her team\u2019s first two Group B losses against Croatia and Montenegro at the ongoing 2024 International Handball Federation (IHF) Women\u2019s Championship in Chuzhou, China, to a lack of experience.<\/p>\n
Nigeria\u2019s first two losses have placed the country on the brink of elimination at the preliminary stage of the 10th IHF Women\u2019s U-18 Championship.<\/p>\n
Speaking with the IHF media team, Babatunde also acknowledged her team\u2019s head coach, Agboola Shittu\u2019s efforts to train and motivate them to make a statement in the tournament.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur coach is also making us play the best we can; therefore, we must respect what he says. We are not that experienced, but we were quite good in the African Championship last year, and we are trying to give our best every time here,\u201d Babatunde said.<\/p>\n
However, she described the tournament as a learning curve for her team, saying that the experience gained will help them improve.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is an amazing experience for us, and we are trying to learn as much as we can here to become even better. Last year, we were in our continental competition; now we are at the World Championship, and we are aiming to become even better,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
As Croatia and Montenegro have progressed to the main round, Nigeria will feature in the President\u2019s Cup alongside Angola, Chile, and one of Serbia, Austria, or Sweden.<\/p>\n
These will be, once again, tough matches, but Babatunde, who has scored five of Nigeria\u2019s goals in the first two matches, expressed optimism that her team could perform better.<\/p>\n
As for her dreams, Babatunde aims high.
\n\u201cI want to become a professional handball player, play for a European side, and become a businesswoman,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nigeria\u2019s national women\u2019s U-18 handball team\u2019s left-back, Taiwo Babatunde, has attributed her team\u2019s first two Group B losses against Croatia and Montenegro at the ongoing 2024 International Handball Federation (IHF) Women\u2019s Championship in Chuzhou, China, to a lack of experience. Nigeria\u2019s first two losses have placed the country on the brink of elimination at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":43741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[1349],"class_list":["post-43740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-ihf-womens-u18"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43740"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43744,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43740\/revisions\/43744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}