KINGSTON, Jamaica (CMC) - Carl Brown, the man
who acted as Brazilian Rene Simoes' assistant during the 1998 World Cup
campaign, believes Jamaica's chance of qualifying for the 2010 event in
South Africa will be tougher.
Jamaica qualified for the 1998 World Cup Finals along with
Mexico and the United States, but according to Brown, Costa Rica, who
made it to the last World Cup, Guatemala and Honduras, all of which were
missing in France, are on their way back.
"It's going to be tougher," said Brown, a former technical director
of Jamaica's Reggae Boyz, on the HITZ 92 FM sports programme on Monday.
"Guatemala are coming back. This Guatemala team a couple weeks back
beat a Mexican team. I don't know what kind of Mexican team, but clearly
some of the better Guatemalan players weren't there.
"So with Honduras and Costa Rica, it's going to be tough, much, much
tougher than we saw in the 1998 campaign."
Asked if the fact that a lot of Jamaicans are playing professionally in
Europe wouldn't make things easier, Brown said there is no substitute
for what the Reggae Boyz achieved nine years ago.
"For every year between 1995 and before we left for the World Cup,
we played 50-plus games every year," he said.
"That was magic! I don't think we will be able to do that this time
around. That to me is probably the biggest disappointment now that we
will be faced with."
Brown said the fact that these players play in Europe, it could be good
and bad.
"Now we will be having nine, 10 or 12 players coming from Europe,
so we will now talk about jetlag, when we talk about tired players coming
into Kingston to play a game on a Sunday or a Wednesday, it's not going
to be easy, but it's possible," he said.
In a desperate bid to qualify, Captain Horace Burrell, president of the
Jamaica Football Federation, fired former technical director Bora Milutinovic
of Serbia less than four days after he returned to the helm of the country's
football.
And less than a month in office, he announced the return of Simoes, who
Brown believes is the best man for the job because he knows the Jamaican
culture and this should help him a big deal.
"He has done it and clearly knows how to do it," Brown said.
The former Jamaica technical director also believes the JFF president
would have an easier job to seek support as most of the business people
would know and respect Simoes, but Brown still laments the toughness of
the campaign.
"I read a letter that Simoes wrote and I think he recognised that
there is a tough task ahead also," Brown said. "It's good that
he recognised that it's going to be totally different from 1994."
According to Brown, another of the challenges ahead is with the Jamaica-based
players and their clubs, something which he believes Simoes is also aware
of ahead of his return.
, December 12, 2007
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