On Saturday evening at the DRV PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA, Guyana’s Men’s football team beat their Grenadian counterparts 5 – 3 on penalty kicks, after the game was tied 1 – 1, at the end of regulation time. The win enabled the Golden Jaguars to advance to the final round in the CONCACAF Gold Cup Prelims, to face Guadeloupe yesterday (as of writing, the result was not known) for a place in the Gold Cup Tournament which commences this Saturday. As the euphoric Guyanese players celebrated a rare victory, the question was posed, where is the coach?
The answer lies in the midst of yet another of the Guyana Football Federation’s (GFF) bungles, which appears to have become part and parcel of their Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) over the last few decades, and the subsequent changes on the ever spinning Guyana’s Men’s team coaching carousel. The current coach of the Golden Jaguars is Jamal Shabazz, a Trinidad and Tobago national, whose appointment was announced on the 17th September, 2021 at the National Training Centre at Providence. Shabazz, who resigned as head coach of the St Lucia men’s team on the 25th August of the same year, replaced Brazil’s Marcio Maximo. Maximo’s two-year contract was not renewed following a disappointing record of four wins, six losses and one draw, with four losses occurring in the final five games under his tutelage.
This is the fourth occasion that Shabazz has ascended to the helm of Head Coach of the Guyana Senior Men’s team, just one shy of Billy Martin’s record five managerial posts with the MLB New York Yankees, between 1975 and 1988. During one of Shabazz’s previous three stints, 2005 – 2008, 2011- 2012, 2015 – 2016, the Golden Jaguars, for the first time, reached the CONCACAF semi-finals of the World Cup qualifiers, during the 2014 campaign. At the press conference, Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Charles Ramson Jr disclosed that the government would provide financial support in the form of accommodation and a vehicle during the entirety of Shabazz’s tenure, perks which were never accorded to Coach Maximo. GFF President Wayne Forde stated that several performance objectives had been identified for Shabazz, with the ultimate aim of qualifying for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The 2026 tournament, which will be jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico and the USA, will have an expanded field of 48 teams, up 16 from the standard 32 of the last seven competitions, dating back to 1998.
In the 5th June edition of this publication, our sports section carried a report that Shabazz was absent from the Golden Jaguars contingent in Jamaica, where the team had been preparing the Gold Cup Prelims at the Football Federation Technical Centre, in Kingston, since the 26th of May. When questioned by our reporter if Shabazz was slated to join the team during the training phase and campaign in the USA, GFF General Secretary Ian Alves answered in the affirmative, but did not do likewise when confronted about Coach Shabazz’s eligibility to travel to the USA.
In an exclusive interview with this newspaper on the 8th June, the GFF President confirmed that Shabazz’s passport was still at the local US Embassy pending approval for a travel visa, and the GFF, CONCACAF, and the Government of Guyana had provided all the necessary support for Shabazz to obtain same. The GFF President then acknowledged, “We were aware of the coach’s US visa status at the point of his employment.” However, the GFF President added that they felt “optimistic of a positive outcome” that the visa issue could be resolved through the joint efforts of the GFF, CONCACAF and the Guyana Government.
Shabazz had served a two-year prison term for his participation in the 1990 Jamaat al Muslimeen coup attempt in Trinidad and Tobago, and since then he has been unable to travel to several countries, including the USA. However, on one occasion, in 2008, when he was coaching the Trinidad and Tobago Women’s team (he has also coached the Men’s team) he was allowed to transit through the US on the way to Mexico.
The GFF’s optimism of a positive outcome of Coach Shabazz obtaining a visa for travel to the USA has fallen very short of expectations, and in the long run, their hopes have come at a tremendous cost. Firstly, FIFA has aligned Guyana in CONCACAF, (North and Central America and Caribbean), one of six continental zones, and not in CONMEBOL (South America), as geographical logic might dictate. Thus, most of our international games will take place within the Caribbean and North America region. The Gold Cup replaced the CONCACAF Championship (1963 -1989) as the official tournament for the zone in 1991, and it became a biennial competition following the third edition in 1996. It has been hosted exclusively by the USA, with just five exceptions, including this year, the seventeenth edition. The USA has shared the hosting honours with Mexico (1993 and 2003), Canada (2015 and 2023), Jamaica and Costa Rica (2019).
Advancing in the Gold Cup qualifiers inevitably means that teams will have to play on American soil. So, why did the GFF hire Shabazz knowing that his chances of travelling to the US were slim to none? Why didn’t the GFF spend a few hours making preliminary enquiries with the local US authorities as to the chances of Shabazz getting permission to enter that country for football tournaments before hiring him? Instead they put the cart before the horse, and now they find themselves with a headless team, and a stalled development programme. If, by some miracle, Guyana does qualify for the 2026 World Cup, what will they do then? Appoint an interim head coach?
This blunder also comes with a huge financial loss. National Head coaches do not come cheap. Shabazz’s salary has never been disclosed, but close observation of the local scene and based on FIFA’s annual disbursements to the GFF, it is estimated that he earns $1,500,000 per month, coupled with the government’s contribution of housing and a vehicle. This makes the entire gaffe just another GFF flub in coaching hires and the waste of precious time and financial resources.
Why should we expect otherwise? This lack of preparation and long-term planning by the GFF is now par for the course. At the 2018 CONCACAF Under-20 Championship, held in Bradenton, Florida, which served as the qualifying tournament for four CONCACAF teams for the 2019 FIFA Under-20 World Cup and also the 2019 Pan American Games Men’s Football Tournament neither the then GFF Technical Director Ian Greenwood nor the recently appointed Golden Jaguars Head Coach Michael Johnson was in attendance for a tournament which should have been the basis for developing a core group to make a serious run for qualifying for the 2026 World Cup (SN editorial, 18th November, 2018, Bradenton Developments).
This Shabazz fiasco is just the latest in a long line of questionable decisions by the GFF.
