Reggae Girlz (from left) Allyson Swaby, Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw and Drew Spen at the launch in January 2023.
IN life the goal should always be to improve, to learn from the past, whether that experience was positive or negative.
Therefore, we believe that Jamaica’s senior women’s football head coach, Mr. Hubert Busby, is on target when he says the team will benefit from last month’s friendly international 0-3 defeat to powerhouse France in that country.
The recent result followed losses to Brazil in mid-year – all part of the preparations for the qualifiers ahead of the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Readers will recall that Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz covered themselves in glory by reaching the knockout stages of the 2023 World Cup in Australia/New Zealand. Four years earlier they broke the ice by qualifying for the global tournament in France.
Following the most recent friendly, Mr Busby noted that inadequate pre-match training time was negatively impacting cohesion and performance.
However, he said: “…I thought overall the team got better as the game went on. I think these are the games we want to play. We just have to keep building…’
He expressed the expectation that the Reggae Girlz will improve in the upcoming friendlies against South Africa.
He also spoke about the challenge of maintaining consistency when new players need to be introduced.
“…You can see that (the team) is a bit disjointed, and so the more we can stay together and keep building as a group, the better we will be,” Mr Busby said.
We know that maintaining a consistent core of players over time is always a challenge. We suspect this is especially the case when, as is widely known, the Jamaica women’s national team is mainly based abroad.
The long-term plan must be to build local women’s soccer programs so that Jamaica can compete well – even if foreign-based professionals are unavailable.
But as Concacaf’s women’s club competition showed earlier this year, the local club competition and the schoolgirl competition are woefully inadequate when it comes to preparing our girls and young women for higher-level competition.
Much more needs to be done.
We tend to believe that primary and preparatory school competitions can help young girls.
Beyond the obvious benefits to national teams, we all know that well-organized and sponsored sports programs offer young people a path out of poverty and hopelessness.
The big problem is always money. Government funding is tight, and Jamaican businesses are often reluctant to spend money on programs that do not provide quick returns.
However, if we think about it for a moment, there is much to be gained for society as a whole if our young people can be positively influenced.
And despite the obstacles here, there are a number of Jamaican born and bred female footballers who have excelled at the highest level, as illustrated during the last World Cup.
For example, we need look no further than Manchester City’s superstar, Ms. Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw. Born in Spanish Town and starting playing football with her brothers, Miss Shaw, who for some reason has not represented her country since the 2023 World Cup, is today among the best footballers in the world.
It is within us as a people to produce many more like them, if we would just try.