DACOSTA CUP TEAMS NEED TO STEP UP

Even if St. Elizabeth Technical High School should avenge the hiding their received from Jamaica College during last season’s Olivier Shield final and advance to the finals of the inaugural LIME Super Cup, there will be need for much introspection for those who manage and coach the teams representing the DaCosta Cup this year.

STETHs is the only school from the D’Cup that is still alive in the LIME Super Cup and if current trends have anything to say, Saturday could be their last day in the competition as JC and the other Manning Cup teams have been completely dominant.

On the opening day of matches two weeks ago, DaCosta Cup teams lost six of eight matches and last week the other remaining team Garvey Maceo ended their match with Holy Trinity with eight players as they slid to a 4-0 defeat.

It was like that from day-one with one set of schools, for the most part, playing something closer to what we expect from a game of football than the others. The Manning Cup teams looked better passing, like they know what the wanted to do with the ball and where they wanted to go with it and when the dust had settled after the opening weekend of matches, the gulf between the teams was stark. With STETHS being the probable exception, the rural-based teams proved to be not as fit, not as strong, not as tactically aware as their counterparts from the Manning Cup. That, for me, was a major disappointment. I grew up in rural Jamaica and was hoping that the D’Cup teams would have put up a better showing but whatever the reasons were, the only thing that became clear was that the D’Cup teams were not ready.

Maybe it has something to do with the surfaces they play on, the support or lack thereof provided by their respective schools, nutrition, or a combination of all of those factors plus others. The evidence will have to be closely scrutinized to make a final determination but if the LIME Cup is to be go on to be a success, something has to change. It could be a consequence of squad depth, not every school can afford a deep squad of players but something is not right. There is an obvious imbalance, especially when you consider what teams are in the final four.

Jamaica College, Wolmers, and STETHS are among the few schools that have been dominant in schoolboy football over the past few years. When you add St. George’s to that list, you pretty much have a who’s who in today’s schoolboy football hierarchy. Wolmer’s knocked out St. George’s in the quarter-finals last weekend.

Maybe these schools are the blueprint for other schools to emulate if they are to find success in schoolboy football at the highest level. Perhaps, other schools need to start studying more carefully the respective formulas of success and come up with one of their own.

The LIME SuperCup needs to be competitive if it is to mean something, and so far only a handful of matches have been. Going forward, the schools that have faltered need to up their games if we are to really have some super matches that will give the Super Cup pride of place in schoolboy football.