Tweet
Friday, October 25, 2002
This is the second part of the RBSC’s interview with Carl Brown and Wendell Downswell, conducted by Karl Wallace and Mosiah Marshall
.
| MM: What do you think is the most significant reason why we don’t support our local coaches? CB: We could say it is a Jamaica thing. The Bible talks about not being honored in one’s own country. And that is typical of what we have seen. I grew up with somebody like George Thompson and I believe that, given the opportunity, he would have succeeded to where some people measure success. In the 1974 Olympic qualifiers, he missed out by one point in going to Germany (Munich Olympics). Nobody treats that with any significance. In 1972 we lost a game in St. Louis against the USA 2-1 when we needed to win that game. That one point would have taken us to Germany. We missed out. Again in another Olympic qualifier, we beat Mexico at the National Stadium. WD: A classic example I can recall (of local coaches not getting support), because Carl was the coach then, we were at GC Foster preparing for three months for World Cup qualifiers, only to be told that the fee was not paid. We had to withdraw from the competition. After 3 or 4 months we had to withdraw! Carl was the coach then. CB: Y'know, I have grown up to feel strongly that I could sit on the corner with the rest of my colleagues for the rest of my life and be honored there because I stayed there with them. Once you move, you are treated a different way. People say that it is Jamaica and I think it is right across the world. The same sort of stigma is attached to just being together, all remain poor, all remain ignorant and then we are one good family. Once you have any movement… For thirty years I have been on trial. For thirty years! I don’t believe that, whoever doesn’t agree that we have local people who can do the job, can mark me any other way but a pass mark, but yet still it is not good enough. I am saying that we need an opportunity. We need a chance as local coaches. Let us move away from the whole stigma. KW: Simoes, he was here preparing us for the 1998 World Cup, in terms of figures and numbers, he had a lot of practice matches, and we were in certain competitions. I am almost sure you can’t answer this, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Would you be able to compare or ask for a similar type of preparation for your team? How many practice matches he had, how many competitive matches he had, where did he go with the team, how many days in camps compared with what is happening now? Because you would like to have that level of support or better. CB: I hear you say that I am not able to answer it, but it is all here. It is part of what I have lived. I don’t have to do any research. Simoes played 52 games per year in the four years that he was here. MM: One a week. CB: Literally one game a week. And we have to understand that that is a big factor for the success we had in 1998. We had a team that literally played throughout the year, every week they had a game. That’s the big factor. Again it boils down to money. If we look at the 2000 campaign, it fell down to 23 and I will tell you, I remember in Morocco, I told the President (Captain Horace Burrell), “Don’t let us, at the end of this campaign, regret that we didn’t spend the money to afford the same opportunities.” If you may remember, after we got that break between July and September we had Mexico playing in the Copa America, Honduras and Costa Rica were there. We were playing St. Kitts and Grenada. We did not win a game after the restart of that competition. We did not use the opportunity to get quality practice games for our team when we got that break. KW: Or the quantity. CB: And it showed up. This is what we are after. This is one of the things I have spoken to with the President and he has promised to go back to the 1998 campaign. Again the National Stadium is limiting our needs and in the last three months we have played 5 games overseas. We are looking at earmarking to getting as close as possible to what we did in 1998 for this campaign. This is something he has promised, but again everything we put on paper in terms of ideas, it becomes a money thing. KW: You brought up a very interesting point there, Carl. The 1998 situation, with the core players being together for so long, how do you see that with your now more challenging part, for many of your top players are now playing overseas? CB: I could look at it as a blessing in disguise, that they would be afforded a professional situation. The four players we got for instance in 1998 campaign brought a lot of professionalism into the game. Now, we looking at about 15 or 16 in England alone. We have another 4 or 5 in the US playing, and I am certain we will benefit in terms of attitude. The game we just played against Japan wasn’t about the ability of the Japanese as opposed to us. It was about the attitude of the Jamaican team that went into that game. If we just go back a little and look at the US game that we lost 5-0, that was the big difference. It was about attitude and that to me is what I want to emphasize in this campaign. We have the necessary talent, and once we get that part of it right, then we will get the sort of success that we saw in Japan. KW: I’m going to take you off track a little bit by asking this question. What kind of emotion or reaction you have to spoiling Zico’s plan of starting with a win? CB: You get used to that when coaching. Everybody has his own goal and desire and its always going to be opposite. Zico wanted that game to give him a very good result, meaning a win. I remember in the press conference we talked about success of the team because we had played four games on the road and we had not lost any. One reporter wanted to know how I would measure success against the Japanese, and I said to him, if the attitude of my players was right, I believe that I would have succeeded because of that. You don’t get emotional about it. At the end of the day, it is either him or me, if Zico is glorified in Japan and Carl Brown had to come home and face the music having lost to Japan, you don’t sympathize. At the end of the day we all understand. As coaches, outside of the game, you sympathize with each other. It is no fun to hear that a coach lost his job, because you know that tomorrow it could be you. Once you get into coaching you know that it comes with something and one of them is dismissal, and that is something I am not afraid of, something I won’t sit down and wonder because there is too much things ahead in terms of succeeding, too much roads to travel, too much burden to carry, for me to spend time thinking about that. So as much as I sympathize knowing that Zico more than anything else wanted to win that game, I was really happy for the result we got. MM: Was there any bad thing about the game? You talked about the good attitude of the players, but was there anything else we could improve upon? CB: There can always be improvements. We could have put away the chances we got in the game. The game was played in two parts - the Japanese got the edge in the first half and we got the better of them in the second half. You want to look at trying to get goals. It has never been the strong point of our campaign, where we get two or three goals regularly. We have always had to rely on the one goal. So if there is anything that was bad it was we didn’t put away the chances that were created. Part 3 of this very informative series will appear on this website next Sunday. Please stay tuned! |