The Guyana National Under-15 boys team will open their campaign in the Claude Elise football tournament today against Martinique in French Guiana from 20:00hrs.
Guyana’s participation in the tournament will serve as preparation for the CONCACAF U15 championships in August 2017. The Guyanese will faceoff with Guadeloupe in their second fixture on December 20th.
According to GFF Technical Director, Ian Greenwood, the tournament is being used for development purposes.
“Ultimately, what we need to stress (is) it is a development tournament; we’re not trying to win the tournament.
We’re going there to try to develop these boys and make them ready for next year’s competition. We’ve got a lot of individual talent. We still need to do a lot of work on how we play as a team, how we defend as a team and how we
attack as a team and the idea of this tournament is to give the boys exposure away from home, exposure to tournament football and, most importantly, exposure to playing better opposition to what they’ve been exposed to before so we’re confident in terms of the developmental process and looking forward to next year,” he said.
According to a release from the GFF, prior to the team’s departure December, 15, Head Coach, Bryan Joseph pointed out that the players were conditioned to think for themselves when facing certain situations.
“We’ve created a positive learning environment in the camp for the kids by encouraging them to be themselves first. We’ve adopted an approach where we basically question them in such a way that they can think and come up with the appropriate answers so they’ve been challenged throughout the duration of the camp. In terms of our on-field preparation, the same was carried over there. The coaching sessions were structured in such a way that the players had to think about the decisions that they’re making. Obviously, we provided the guide, we provided the challenges and I think that they have done very well to step up to those challenges,” said Joseph.
Commenting on the fitness of the team, Joseph stated: “The fitness is not where we would have liked it to be. Obviously, a lot of the players would have played in the NAMILCO U-17 tournament … So, we did a lot of work in the initial days of the camp, trying to get the players up to a proper fitness level, we think we have achieved that so I think right now, the players are at a level where they can compete in the short-term,” he added.
