With less than three months remaining in 2020 and the unlikely resumption of sports owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, President of the Georgetown Football Association (GFA) Otis James, stated that the association will stage an important executive meeting today to discuss the scheduled plans for 2021.
This was revealed yesterday during an exclusive interview with Stabroek Sport. According to James, who is a former FIFA referee, the location for the forum will be confirmed in the morning to the respective executives and will be focused on the plans for the impending year.
He added, “The GFA would keep an executive meeting to highlight the issues that occurred in 2020 and create plans for 2021. Even if there was to be an opening up in the remaining months of 2020, the GFF Super 16 will take precedence over every other tournament and will have qualifiers inclusive of Georgetown teams. We want to write to the clubs to tell them about the situation because we are in a 2021 mood, and we are starting to put plans in place for 2021 because it’s very unlikely that we are going to get any chance to play in 2020.”
According to James, among the major points of discussion will be the implementation of the entity’s academy structure, elaborating “What will mostly be discussed at the meeting is the association’s plan for an academy that will take centre stage because we are working on the rebuilding stage at the association. We want to have two academies because of the size of the association, a north and south zone, instead of one. It will be two associations which will allow us to see more players. The GFA must now focus on the grassroots to rebuild the product and because of the work at the academies we will have a lot of major youth tournaments.”
He further revealed, that the subject of funding for tournaments and the intended direction of women’s football will also be on the agenda for discussion, adding, “We don’t have a direct platform for that, taking one stage at a time and get some clubs organized at the GFA level and play tournaments so that we can develop it into a women’s league for the GFA directly. We don’t have all the answers for women’s football at the moment, we are trying to brainstorm ideas. In the future we plan to have a women’s committee to oversee the direction of women’s football at the GFA level.”
He further affirmed, “The GFF showed their hands in every department, in all departments. In terms of corporate Guyana, some of them have said yes but with the situation we have to go back and negotiate. We can’t say we have all the funding at the moment because we know the situation with COVID-19 because everything is at square one.”
