Following Trinidad and Tobago’s, Jamaal Shabazz’s resignation as Head Coach of the Golden Jaguars, his successor is yet to be named but acting president of the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) , Franklin Wilson, hinted that the next coach will be Guyanese.
During an interview with Stabroek Sport yesterday, Wilson also outlined some of the GFF’s plans for 2012 and weighed in on the GFF/GFA saga.
“We are going to go local in terms of the continued focus on coaching in terms of the junior and senior levels” said Wilson.
“We feel we have to focus more on employment of a few more coaches to be consistent in honing the talents of our youngsters at all levels as I said before, the technical development officer and a few other are looking at some proposals to the executives and based on that we will know again based on our financial capacity how many coaches we can employ and at what levels”.
Wilson added “We are looking for a coaching pool, we cannot list any names at the moment but what we want to do is to create a team of coaches that can analyze the current state of Guyana’s football in a modern way, utilizing the modern trends and style of coaching and see how best we can consolidate in moving forward”.
When quizzed on if Assistant Coach, Wayne Dover, who manned the sidelines when Guyana achieved its highest FIFA ranking of 86 and who was symbolically anointed by Shabazz as his successor ,is the top candidate for the job, Wilson replied:
“As I said we cannot preempt but I think any handing over will have to come from the Guyana Football Federation who is the employer of the coaches, yes Jamaal and Mr. Dover worked well in tandem but going forward we will need to widen the pool so more persons can be involved but again I don’t want to preempt the composition of the technical staff but we are looking to do the best we could in the current circumstances” Wilson assured.
In outlining some of the GFF’s plans for 2013, the acting president stated:
“Naturally the continuity of the senior programme, we will try to the best of our ability to utilize the FIFA dates in terms of friendly matches, next year is going to be a busy year for female football so we have to choose the tournaments that we would want to participate in”.
he continued “We will continue the Super League that started this year, we broke off partially in the first round, we will continue in February and then we will go into the second round, the inter association tournaments will continue as well, Coaches and referees development will continue and very shortly we will be presenting FIFA badges for the year 2013 to about 10 or 12 referees”.
“The business of football will continue into 2013 and we are hoping to be stronger and firmer holistically despite the challenges, the work of football and the development will continue, our main aim is the development of football and its continuity”.
Weighing in on the GFF/GFA saga Wilson noted that with the intervention of FIFA mid next month, the sport should return to normalcy.
“As you know FIFA will be here in mid January to deal will the GFF/GFA impasse with the aim of that being sorted out so that football locally could return to its normalcy that is needed for the continued development of the game, we do not need any division, we need everybody reading out of the same book” said Wilson.
