Men's U17s in Spain to prepare for Elite Round

Our men's Under-17 national team will host the Euro qualification mini-tournament in March as they aim to reach the UEFA U17 European Championship for the third time in five years. Antal Németh's squad have been drawn in a very tough Elite-round group with France, Norway and Sweden all due to be opponents in the Pancho Aréna between 25th and 31st March. Ahead of this tournament, Hungary will play three warm-up matches in the next week attheir training camp in Spain; against Czech Republic on Wednesday, versus Scotland on Friday and against Saudi Arabia on Sunday, all in the resort of La Manga. Before they arrived in Spain at lunchtime on Tuesday, the players had participated in four training sessions in Leipzig between Sunday and Tuesday morning.

"Two of our regular members are injured and our players who play their club football in Italy have not been released by their clubs, so we do have absences but at the same time that gives us the opportunity to try out those players who caught our attention with their performances in the autumn and have a good chance of being selected for the Elite-round squad", Németh told MLSZ.hu. "We'd like to improve in every element of the game in the week ahead of us; to finetune our defence, speed up our transitions to attack and to be more confident in possession of the ball. We'll play against strong teams with the Czechs and Scots also preparing for the Elite Round and we expect it will be difficult against Saudi Arabia too, but I'm sure we'll make steps forward during the course of the week. Meanwhile, Sweden and Norway are also holding training camps here, so we'll have thechance to assess two of our Elite-round rivals in the coming days too," Németh concluded.