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You simply MUST do better, Western Confed
sporting edgePaul Reid
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Either Wadadah FC or Negril FC will represent the Western Confederation in the Jamaica Football Federation play-offs for one of the two promotion places in the Premier League next season.
The teams earned their berths in the two-way final after two nail-biting semi-finals were completed last Saturday at Jarrett Park.
Wadadah benefited from a last-minute error from the Granville goalkeeper to force the game into extra time before winning on penalty kicks while Negril came from a goal down in the first leg to beat Salt Spring 3-2 on aggregate. Salt Spring could have wrapped up the tie with mere minutes to go on Saturday but let Negril off the hook and paid dearly.
The debates as to whether the best team won in the semi-final will rage on for a while, and while I will agree with those who think Granville is by far the best team in the region, such is the nature of sports. As they say, goals, not points, win matches.
Leaping forward, I doubt any of the four semi-finalists would make a decent Premier League team and even if we were to combine all four Western Confederation semi-finalists, this team would have problems beating any of the bottom four teams in the Premier League today.
Anyhow, the real question from last weekend was whether the Western Confederation did enough to ensure the teams played on an equal footing.
Granville played two hard games, in the space of three days, both going to penalty kicks which obviously took its toll.
On Thursday, Granville created one of the biggest upsets in a long time in local football by beating Portmore United in the quarter-finals of the COK Champions Cup Knockout and turned around 48 hours later to face Wadadah in the return leg semi-final.
The Western Confederation must have seen this and should have taken pre-emptive measures to give their team a fighting chance.
Surely they could have asked that the COK game be played a day earlier or pushed back the semi-final to a few days later.
I suspect however that all the Confed executives saw was how much money they could make at the gate on a Saturday and not the welfare of the teams.
Any competent football administration would have seen that one of their teams would be asked to play two tough games in a 48-hour period and done something to make sure they were not extended too far.
Mind you, there was more than just this snag that affected the semi-finals on Saturday. The games got off to a late start as the information surrounding the start time was not precise. One team heard 4:00 pm while the other heard 5:00 pm. This is unacceptable at any level, especially when communication is so easy and nearly everyone has a cellphone.
This is not the first time that teams have got the start times mixed up; there were times in the seasons when teams were not told about games till less than 24 hours prior. Simply unacceptable!
Also on Saturday, there was no medical personnel on stand-by in case of any serious accident. As a matter of fact, the stretcher was manned not by people appointed by the Confederation but by a policeman who happened to be at the game and the president of the Western Referee Group.
There is a lot to be done and most of them are the simple things.
sporting edgePaul Reid
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Either Wadadah FC or Negril FC will represent the Western Confederation in the Jamaica Football Federation play-offs for one of the two promotion places in the Premier League next season.
The teams earned their berths in the two-way final after two nail-biting semi-finals were completed last Saturday at Jarrett Park.
Wadadah benefited from a last-minute error from the Granville goalkeeper to force the game into extra time before winning on penalty kicks while Negril came from a goal down in the first leg to beat Salt Spring 3-2 on aggregate. Salt Spring could have wrapped up the tie with mere minutes to go on Saturday but let Negril off the hook and paid dearly.
The debates as to whether the best team won in the semi-final will rage on for a while, and while I will agree with those who think Granville is by far the best team in the region, such is the nature of sports. As they say, goals, not points, win matches.
Leaping forward, I doubt any of the four semi-finalists would make a decent Premier League team and even if we were to combine all four Western Confederation semi-finalists, this team would have problems beating any of the bottom four teams in the Premier League today.
Anyhow, the real question from last weekend was whether the Western Confederation did enough to ensure the teams played on an equal footing.
Granville played two hard games, in the space of three days, both going to penalty kicks which obviously took its toll.
On Thursday, Granville created one of the biggest upsets in a long time in local football by beating Portmore United in the quarter-finals of the COK Champions Cup Knockout and turned around 48 hours later to face Wadadah in the return leg semi-final.
The Western Confederation must have seen this and should have taken pre-emptive measures to give their team a fighting chance.
Surely they could have asked that the COK game be played a day earlier or pushed back the semi-final to a few days later.
I suspect however that all the Confed executives saw was how much money they could make at the gate on a Saturday and not the welfare of the teams.
Any competent football administration would have seen that one of their teams would be asked to play two tough games in a 48-hour period and done something to make sure they were not extended too far.
Mind you, there was more than just this snag that affected the semi-finals on Saturday. The games got off to a late start as the information surrounding the start time was not precise. One team heard 4:00 pm while the other heard 5:00 pm. This is unacceptable at any level, especially when communication is so easy and nearly everyone has a cellphone.
This is not the first time that teams have got the start times mixed up; there were times in the seasons when teams were not told about games till less than 24 hours prior. Simply unacceptable!
Also on Saturday, there was no medical personnel on stand-by in case of any serious accident. As a matter of fact, the stretcher was manned not by people appointed by the Confederation but by a policeman who happened to be at the game and the president of the Western Referee Group.
There is a lot to be done and most of them are the simple things.
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