Fuente: © UEFA (English)
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UEFA ORGANISATION: Top coaches look to future

/noticias.info/ by Paul Saffer
from Nyon

The future form and organisation of UEFA's female tournaments was high on the agenda as the cream of women's coaching met for today's UEFA Elite Women's Coaches Forum at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland.

Leading coaches
UEFA technical director Andy Roxburgh chaired a round-table discussion with 24 leading trainers from European national senior and youth teams as well as club football plus UEFA Women's Football Committee chairwoman Karen Espelund, following on from smaller discussions held in recent years. Among those present were Tina Theune-Meyer, who coached Germany to victory at UEFA WOMEN'S EURO 2005™, her successor Silvia Neid and the men who led the winners of the last three UEFA Women's Cups - Umeå IK's Andrée Jeglertz, 1. FFC Turbine Potsdam's Bernd Schröder and 1. FFC Frankfurt's Jürgen Tritschoks.

Competitions
There was widespread agreement that the UEFA European Women's Championship tournaments at senior and Under-19 levels, as well as the club-based UEFA Women's Cup, have helped boost standards. The participants were also pleased that UEFA WOMEN'S EURO 2009™, for which the qualifying draw was made today, will have 12 rather than eight teams in the finals, with a suggestion that 16 could soon be feasible. The coaches discussed the finer matters of final tournament organisation, from training facilities to accommodation.

Fixture congestion
A UEFA European Women's U17 Championship begins next season and the coaches spoke about the future direction of that event as, although there will only be a four-team finals at first, the unexpectedly high entry of 40 associations could lead to expansion. The new competition also formed part of a conversation on the increasingly congested fixture calendar, with issues including the scheduling of the UEFA Women's Cup final, which is currently a two-legged affair in April, to ensure good attendances.

Refereeing
Refereeing was considered with some coaches feeling that UEFA needs to do more than just deploy female officials for women's games, and that mixing with top male referees would help their female colleagues develop. On the matter of injuries, the Italian coaches revealed the increasing number of knee ligament problems their players had suffered, while Netherlands trainer Vera Pauw pointed to a programme the Dutch had developed involving co-ordinated training schedules that had reduced just such complaints.

'So much progress'
Nevertheless, the improvement in standards in women's football is clear. Roxburgh told uefa.com: "There is so much progress and development that we are talking about a crowded programme and the prevention of injury, as players are being asked to play in an intense manner. We're starting to talk about TV and sophisticated levels of competition structures. I've been at UEFA 12 years, and you could not recognise what has happened over the last decade or so. You are breathless trying to keep up with it. And it was a fantastic turnout - the crème de la crème." notas_de_prensa_archivo