U-20 Lady Jags drawn in Group F for CONCACAF Championships

The Under-20 Lady Jags have been pitted against some powerhouses in the CONCACAF region, as the draw for the Under-20 Women’s Championships 2022 were conducted Monday in Miami, Florida.
Guyana’s Under-20 women’s team were on Monday morning drawn in Group F of the CONCACAF U-20 Championships, set for February 2022. The group is seen as a tough one, with Mexico, Honduras and Panama being drawn alongside Guyana.
The tournament is scheduled to kick off February 25, 2022 in the Dominican Republic and run until March 12, 2022.
Group E consists of the United States, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua; Group G – Canada, Trinidad & Tobago, El Salvador, Saint Kitts & Nevis and Group H – Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala, and Cuba.
The tournament will commence with a 16-team group stage, with teams competing to top their groups. The top three teams from each group will advance to the next round of play, where they will meet the teams that came through the qualifying tournament.
Those teams are: Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Curaçao and Suriname.
In the following round, the teams will play to stay alive in the competition, as a straight knockout format begins.
The Under-20 Lady Jags team did not have to participate in the qualifying tournament, which was held back in September, owing to their ranking in the CONCACAF region. Ranked 10th out of 41 female teams in CONCACAF (Women’s Under-20 Rankings as of March 31, 2020), Guyana were exempted from the qualifiers, thus heading straight into the Championships. The highest ranked 16 teams in CONCACAF were given automatic entry to the group stage of the Championships.
The winner of the CONCACAF 2022 Under-20 Women’s Championships, along with the second- and third-place finishers, will book their spot in the 2022 FIFA Women’s U-20 World Cup in Costa Rica in August of 2022. Additionally, the same three teams that will qualify for the World Cup will join hosts Costa Rica as CONCACAF’s four representatives in the global event.
In the 2020 Women’s U-20 Championships, the Lady Jags team made it as far as the quarterfinal stage for the first time in Guyana’s football history. Prior to that, Guyana finished second in their group after that stage; eventual runners-up Mexico topped the group, with Puerto Rico and Nicaragua finishing third and second respectively. (Jemima Holmes)