8-0 DRUBBING; FACING FOOTBALL REALITY

So Jamaica gets thrashed by France during the latter’s final World Cup warm up match and the country is in an uproar. Ha!

Reality can be such a tough thing to face.

I am convinced that since this country qualified for the ’98 World Cup, in France, many of this nation’s football loving citizens feel we have a divine right to be there every four years. But while in principle there is nothing wrong with the ambition, our reality makes it quite a challenge to live up to expectations.

There are several points here to consider.

1) Football is not track and field, an individual sport that requires great levels of personal sacrifice and hard work to be able to excel at the very highest level.

2) Jamaica has never really excelled at team sports. Besides the national netball team that consistently ranks among the top five in the world, no other Jamaican team has really done all that well. Yes, Jamaica has won the Caribbean Cup several times and occasionally shows flashes of potential at the CONCACAF Gold Cup and we qualified for ’98 but very little else.

Team is a concept lost on most of us. We are separated by class, race, socio-economic backgrounds; everything. When players are brought in from overseas we label them ‘overseas players’, we separate those who play in our pathetic domestic league from those who play abroad as if the fact that they represent the same country means very little.

I have never heard France, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, England, Uruguay, or Italy refer to their players in any other way other than that they are players representing their respective countries. But even then they would be better able to considering that their respective domestic leagues are so much better than ours.

But lets compare. Jamaica has a comparatively atrociously poor domestic league where the clubs are broke, the players hungry and destitute and playing on fields that are nothing but rectangular patches of earth. There is also a lack of a  clearly defined developmental programmes and we have and average coaches. We also have no player, not one single one, playing for the best teams in the best leagues in the world.

Let’s now compare that to France, for example; the team that walloped Jamaica by eight goals to nil in it’s final warm up match before it begins a World Cup campaign that is actually capable of winning.

Le Bleus is comprised of world-class players like forward Karim Benzema, who stars for Real Madrid one of the top clubs in the world; Oliver Giroud and  Paul Pogba, the 60-million Pound rated midfielder who plays for Italian league champions Juventus. They are also blessed with Patrice Evra, who has had a successful career at Manchester United, a team that before last season was the toast of England as well as Franck Ribery and Samir Nasri, (who are both not even going to the World Cup); Eric Abidal and Gael Clichy. Their team roster reads like a who’s who in world football.

The French domestic league boasts teams like Paris St. Germain, Monaco, Lille, and St. Etienne, top clubs in Europe. The country also boasts a strong development programme for their youngsters.

I could go on and on but you get the picture. The differences between Jamaica and France are as stark as night and day.

There are those who will argue that Jamaica is better than going down 0-8 and they wouldn’t be wrong. After all, the Reggae Boyz in their last three matches had decent performances against Serbia, Switzerland and Egypt before running into the French goal-scoring machine. That is easily explained. One is that Jamaica may have just had an off-day. The other is that the Reggae Boyz team is not a cohesive unit; not yet. This was a makeshift team of players who were being tested against an opponent that is among the best in the world and that is now a finely tuned machine about to launch a campaign to win the World Cup, not just play in it.

France, by the way, is only one of eight countries to win the World Cup. Jamaica has never won the World Cup and will never win it. We wont even compete in it, should we get back there, with an intention other than to do well. So what’s our problem?

After that pasting, we got a clear idea of how far a road we have to travel. We know what is lacking (pace, quickness of thinking, the ability to make tactical adjustments on the fly are just some of those things). We also know we have a short amount of time to get a young core of players together, honing them for the next World Cup campaign that begins in just over a year’s time.

This is not a time to let pride cloud the collective judgement of a nation. We should see the result as an eye-opener as to what we as a nation needs to do. We need to overhaul the way football is governed. A proper club structure, a viable one needs to be developed, and a proper developmental programme needs to be introduced. Until we can do those things with any consistency maybe a short-term goal would be to develop players to sell to clubs overseas (kind of what we do now) but become better at it. Those players could improve their games in the best leagues in the world and come back together for World Cup campaigns, more successful ones than those we have endured since ’98.

No, now is not the time to be upset that we got a royal pasting from France. This could be the dark cloud that bears our well-needed silver lining.