Contrary to past procedure, the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) will not be sharing a provisional squad for the Senior Men’s National Team ahead of their upcoming FIFA World Cup Qualifying games. Instead, the Federation will release their final team on March 17.
The Senior Men’s Football team, commonly referred to as the Golden Jaguars will be travelling to the Dominican Republic on March 17, for two CONCACAF World Cup qualifying games against Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.
Like past international engagements, a provisional squad was expected to be released. However, the GFF has chosen to go against this tradition for a plethora of reasons. Technical Director Ian Greenwood while hinting that there may be a provisional squad that will not be publicized, said that they are looking to only release the team list that they are sure will go to the DR.
GFF’s Technical Director Ian Greenwood, President Wayne Forde and Head Coach Marcio Maximo
“The provisional squad has not been announced publicly. We’ll wait until the final squad because there’s a lot of issues with players being released from clubs so we want to make sure that that is available. There are also a few players that have been called provisionally that we’re now having to deal with their medical team because there’s one or two slight niggling injuries that we need to confirm,” Greenwood disclosed.
He continued explaining, “So, the reason why we’re leaving until till the day that we travel is because we know that that will be the team that will go there’s still a few question marks with the selection from the especially international bass players because of situations they have with a club, situation that may help with some slight movement injuries as well.”
On the other hand, Head Coach Marcio Maximo presented a different perspective, sharing that releasing a team list until the ninth hour maintains motivation amongst the locally based players.
Marcio posited, “When you delay to give the announcement, you keep the motivation, the players until as possible. You know, because everybody wants to, even here the group wants to go, but we have limited numbers here, you maintain the motivation, high motivation until last minute, because they want to come into the national team.”
For GFF President Wayne Forde, there is too much going on behind the scenes to disclose the lucky players. According to the football boss, the Federation is avoiding making multiple team announcements.
“We would want to announce a squad as early as possible, but they are situations that is simply outside of our control. And it’s better to make one announcement than to be making an announcement and adjusting it because this didn’t come through or this didn’t happen.”
So, I just want to make sure that the media and the public is clear that it’s not in the interest of the Federation to hold that information back without any good reason. It’s just that there are many moving pieces behind the scene. And until those pieces are properly aligned, it would be not in anyone’s interest to go out and make announcements. So, I wanted to make sure that, that that is clear,” The football boss maintained.
While the GFF remains tight-lipped about their selectees, several Clubs in the UK have announced the selection of Guyana’s Internationally based players via social media.
To this, Greenwood answered that the ‘premature’ announcements by the International Clubs are as a result of the GFF formalities, in releasing players for international engagements.
“In terms of squad release, there’ll be letters going out to various players of various clubs, because there’s certain deadlines where we have to send information out to the clubs,” Greenwood stated.
No friends, no friendlies
When it comes to in-game preparation for the international stage; the Golden Jaguars will have no such experience this time around as the mission to play friendly games has been aborted.
“We have worked extremely hard in recent months to organize friendly matches against suitable national teams. We’ve had discussions with two CONCACAF members, and I’ve made provisional arrangements with them. Unfortunately, however, these fixtures have had to be postponed due to the ongoing challenges created by the restriction on international travel, the COVID-19 regulations,” The GFF President had previously said.
Expressing his confidence in the team’s management and other preparatory methods, Forde declared that he believes the team is up to par for the competition.
He commented, “I don’t have the competency to talk about how the guys are developing, technically, tactically, I’m sure the courts will want to weigh in on that. But as the head of the Guyana Football fraternity, I derive my opinion on these things based on the specific decisions that I take as the leader and the investment that I’m making. So, the short answer is that I am confident that the team will be extremely competitive against any opponent within our region.”
Meanwhile, Coach Maximo explained that the lack of friendlies is a common situation for many National teams. (It is important to note that Guyana’s first opponents T$T were involved in a friendly match with the USA on January 31st, where the Caribbean team went down 7-0.)
Maximo stated, “If you see around, not many Countries did friendly matches, because the situation about the pandemic. Like the President told before, we arranged two friendly matches, but the two federations fall with us because they supposed to come, the government we delay the dates and not because they don’t play as well.”
Zeroing on their preparations, irrespective of the friendly games, Maximo said, “And also, we try and minimize this gap with good intensive training. Because if you see most of our international players stopped some parts of the competitions there as well have in these two only training because the England state division for the visit, stop little get some leads.”
“So, I think this is the general situation not only in Guyana. Each coach will minimize this problem with intensive, proper training to take a good result.”
