The Lady Jaguars will lock horns with Dominica this evening at the National Track and Field Centre, Leonora from 8:00 pm in the first round of the Concacaf ‘W’ Championship Qualifiers, which also serves as the pathway for the 2023 FIFA World Cup.
The pre-match press conference which was staged at the Ramada Hotel yesterday was dominated by challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic on the respective team’s preparatory period.
Head-coach of the Lady Jaguars, Dr. Ivan Joseph, said, “The pandemic has affected us all, whether individually or organizationally and like many of the federations we had to deal with changes, lockdowns and restrictions that impacted our ability to gather, to train, to weightlift and put in exhibition schedules so we used the last few days which we call a minicamp as an opportunity to assess and bring in players and find talent and then select the team. In a perfect world, this would be final tuning, you would have a 23-person roster and be ready to go but everybody has had to deal with the pandemic, it’s not an excuse we can make, it’s a reality that we have to live with.”