Forde pleased with Guyanese performance in Youth Academy Cup

…impressed by “underdog” champions Guyana Panthers

On Sunday, the Guyana Panthers jubilantly lifted the inaugural Youth Academy Cup championship trophy at the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) National Training Centre (NTC), Providence, after downing the Guyana Jaguars 4-3 on penalties.
The tournament featured two Academy teams each out of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. According to GFF President Wayne Forde, he is pleased with the way in which the Guyanese performed against the international opposition.
“Of course, I believe to have a dominant score of 4-2, we had a lot of possession of the ball and moving the ball around a lot. A lot of the things we’re trying to make sure becomes natural to our playing style, we saw it in all the games and we’re happy and always warm in welcoming our Trinidadian counterparts here, but you know, we like to make sure that we measure ourselves against them, because we know they’re doing a lot of good work, especially in the academies,” the GFF President told Guyana Times Sport exclusively.

He added, “So, yeah we’re happy with the overall performance of our two teams.”
Interestingly, the second-placed Jaguars roster possessed more of the first-rate National Under-16 players as compared to the champion Panthers.
Highlighting this fact, the GFF President shared how it augured well for the national programme that was preparing for competition in 2025.
Forde divulged, “The Jaguars is the team that we believed had the greater talent, had the deeper talent but obviously, they did not prevail as the champions here today.”
“If you understand football, you will know that anytime you put a national programme together, and you have a B team that is being prepared alongside an A team; the match between the B team and A team is always viciously competitive, because the B team is the one that has something to prove and often times they prevail.

“The difference between these two teams here is the intensity. Those youngsters that are a part of the Panthers team clearly came out here to work hard and I think the work rate is what separated these two teams here today. This is a good thing, it is a wake-up call for those guys that ‘hey you know what, you’re going to face competition on the international scene similar to this’ and I think some of the youngsters from the Panthers team made a statement for themselves and I’m sure they’ve given the Technical Director and his team a lot to think about,” the GFF boss opined.
The Youth Academy Cup, according to Forde, will not be a one-off event, with expansion plans already in the pipeline for the 2025 edition.
“We’ve had some exciting matches and we’re going to be doing this bigger and better next year. We’re going to be inviting academies out of Suriname and maybe we’ll even go a bit further, given our relationship with other football MA’s [Member Associations] around the world.”
He further explained, “Yes, what we’re really trying to do is make sure we have international exposure for our players that are likely going to be part of our national team set-up and while this is not competition between two MA’s, they had exposure of different styles.”
“We’re going to definitely go to the drawing board and see how we can make this more exciting and obviously, include more teams in 2025,” Forde assured.