Contrary to past procedure, the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) will not be sharing a provisional squad for the Senior Men’s National Team ahead of their upcoming FIFA World Cup Qualifying games. Instead, the Federation will release their final team on March 17.
The Senior Men’s Football team, commonly referred to as the Golden Jaguars will be travelling to the Dominican Republic on March 17, for two CONCACAF World Cup qualifying games against Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.
Like past international engagements, a provisional squad was expected to be released. However, the GFF has chosen to go against this tradition for a plethora of reasons.
Technical Director Ian Greenwood while hinting that there may be a provisional squad that will not be publicized, said that they are looking to only release the team list that they are sure will go to the DR.
“The provisional squad has not been announced publicly. We’ll wait until the final squad because there’s a lot of issues with players being released from clubs so we want to make sure that that is available. There are also a few players that have been called provisionally that we’re now having to deal with their medical team because there’s one or two slight niggling injuries that we need to confirm,” Greenwood disclosed.
He continued explaining, “So, the reason why we’re leaving until till the day that we travel is because we know that that will be the team that will go there’s still a few question marks with the selection from the especially international bass players because of situations they have with a club, situation that may help with some slight movement injuries as well.”
On the other hand, Head Coach Marcio Maximo presented a different perspective, sharing that releasing a team list until the ninth hour maintains motivation amongst the locally based players.
Marcio posited: “When you delay to give the announcement, you keep the motivation, the players until as possible. You know, because everybody wants to, even here the group wants to go, but we have limited numbers here, you maintain the motivation, high motivation until last minute, because they want to come into the national team.”
For GFF President Wayne Forde, there is too much going on behind the scenes to disclose the lucky players. According to the football boss, the Federation is avoiding making multiple team announcements.
“We would want to announce a squad as early as possible, but they are situations that is simply outside of our control. And it’s better to make one announcement than to be making an announcement and adjusting it because this didn’t come through or this didn’t happen.”
So, I just want to make sure that the media and the public is clear that it’s not in the interest of the Federation to hold that information back without any good reason. It’s just that there are many moving pieces behind the scene. And until those pieces are properly aligned, it would be not in anyone’s interest to go out and make announcements. So, I wanted to make sure that, that that is clear,” the football boss maintained.
While the GFF remains tight-lipped about their selectees, several Clubs in the UK have announced the selection of Guyana’s Internationally based players via social media.
The Golden Jags are pegged to take on T&T and the Bahamas on March 25 and 30 respectively.
