KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Jamaica are thrilled with their draw for next February’s CONCACAF Beach Football Championship, after being installed in Group A of the competition.
They will play alongside the likes of hosts the Bahamas, Belize, and Guyana in the February 20-26, and captain Andre Reid said his side were more than comfortable with the match-ups.
“We played Belize in qualifying and we won that game,” he told the Gleaner newspaper here.
“Guyana is a team we played already in a competition in Trinidad. We beat that team also, but it’s a pretty young team from about two years ago. So we know they’re supposed to be coming with something different this time around.”
He continued: “Bahamas should be a really good game. We played them about three or four times overall. They have only ever beaten us once. This was in the last qualifiers. We went there a couple years ago when they were opening their stadium.
“We beat them there – we beat them all over the place – but in the last qualifier, they beat us, so this should be a really good game for us.”
Jamaica open against Belize on February 20 in a 4:20 pm encounter before clashing with Guyana the following day at 6:45 pm.
They take on the hosts in the feature 8 pm game on February 21, ahead of the playoffs which get going two days later.
Reid said based on the opposition, he expected his side to definitely get out of the preliminaries.
“The group is a very good group, and, trust me, we can manage this group,” he said.
“We should definitely go through in this group. We are Jamaicans – [we have a] never-say-die attitude.”
Sixteen teams will do battle across four groups in the tournament. Barbados find themselves in a difficult Group B against Mexico, Canada and Guadeloupe while in Group C, Trinidad and Tobago take on Antigua and Barbuda, US Virgin Islands and United States.
In Group D, Turks and Caicos face El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica.
The winner and runner-up from each group will advance to the quarter-finals while the two top teams from the tournament, along with Bahamas, will be CONCACAF’s three representatives at the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup in Bahamas 2017 next April.
