Let’s do more to support women’s football

IN life, the goal should always be to improve, to learn from the past, whether that experience was positive or negative.

We therefore believe Jamaica Women’s Head Coach Mr Hubert Busby is on target when he says the team will benefit from last month’s 0-3 international friendly defeat to that country’s mighty France.

The recent result followed away losses to Brazil midway through the year – all part of the build-up to the 2027 FIFA World Cup qualifiers.

Readers will recall that Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz covered themselves in glory by reaching the knockout stages of the 2023 World Cup in Australia/New Zealand. Four years earlier, they broke the ice by qualifying for the global tournament in France.

Following the most recent friendly, Mr Busby noted that inadequate training time before the game had adversely affected cohesion and performance.

However, he said: “… I thought overall (that) as the game went on, the team got better. I think these are the games we want to play. We just have to keep building…”

He expressed his expectation that the Reggae Girlz will improve in the upcoming home friendlies against South Africa.

He also spoke about the challenge of maintaining cohesion when new players have to be brought in.

“… You can see that (the team is) a bit disjointed, and so the more we can continue to be together and continue to build as a group, the better off we’ll be,” Mr Busby said.

We know that maintaining a consistent core of players over time is always a challenge. We suspect this is especially so when, as is well established, Jamaica’s women’s national team is predominantly overseas.

The long-term plan must be to create local women’s soccer programs so that Jamaica can compete well – even when professionals from abroad are not available.

However, as the Concacaf women’s club league showed earlier this year, the local club league and schoolboy league are woefully inadequate in terms of preparing our girls and young women for higher level competition.

More needs to be done.

We are inclined to think that primary/prep school leagues for young girls could help.

Besides the obvious benefits to national teams, we all know that well-organized and sponsored sports programs offer young people a way out of poverty and hopelessness.

The big problem is always money. Government funding is stretched, and corporate Jamaica is often reluctant to spend on programs that do not show quick promotional returns.

However, if we stop to think about it, society as a whole has a lot to gain if our youth can be positively influenced.

And despite the obstacles here, there are a number of female footballers born and bred in Jamaica who have excelled at the highest level, as exemplified at the last World Cup.

For an example, we need look no further than Manchester City superstar Ms Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw. A native of Spanish Town who started playing football with her brothers, Miss Shaw – who for one reason or another did not represent her country at the 2023 World Cup – is among the world’s leading footballers today.

It is in us as a people to produce many more like her, if we would try.