‘No pressure for Girlz’ - Busby confident Jamaica senior women’s team will be ready for revamped Concacaf calendar
Published:Saturday | January 30, 2021 | 12:13 AMDaniel Wheeler/Staff Reporter
National senior women’s football team head coach Hubert Busby Jr says that despite the revamped format of the FIFA Women’s World Cup qualifiers, he does not believe that any additional pressure has been placed on the Reggae Girlz to qualify for future tournaments.
Concacaf revised the women’s football calendar in December to include more international matches and a reorganised qualifying competition for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which has been expanded to 32 teams.
The qualifiers are expected to begin in November with the teams who are ranked third and below in the region participating in the group stage, drawn into six groups of five. The group winners will qualify for a ‘centralised final event’ to take place in April 2022, joining the top two teams in the region, the United States and Canada.
Although the number of automatic qualifying sports has increased from three to four because of the changes, Busby says that there is no added pressure to guarantee consecutive qualifications, but stressed that being prepared makes things easier.
BEING PREPARED
“Expectations and pressure just come with the territory,” he said. “I don’t think anyone feels any pressure unless you are unprepared, and so I think it comes back to again saying that as long as we are fully prepared and do what is required to have these teams ready for those competitions, then I think we will be fine,” Busby told The Gleaner. “I think you feel the pressure when you know going in that you are not quite prepared, like we were going into the Olympics [qualifiers]. We didn’t have the necessary camps or games going in.”
Jamaica won only one of three group games in the Concacaf Olympic qualifying tournament last January, missing the Tokyo Games. The programme has since been inactive as plans for camps and international friendlies were pushed back for reasons said to be related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
No timeline has been given for authorisation to resume footballing activities for the senior women, and while Busby says that he and the Jamaica Football Federation have been working towards a solution, he acknowledges that the pandemic has made things complicated.
“It’s difficult, but everything is fluid [right now],” Busby said. “At the same time, we also know that some of these decisions might just be taken out of our hands and might take a little longer than expected. There’s really only a few of the top 20 nations who have the resources to go out there and train and prepare accordingly.”
One of those nations is the United States who are expected to host the SheBelieves Cup next month. However, the pandemic has affected participation as Japan pulled out of the tournament citing a spike in cases in that country.
Despite the challenges, Busby says that they have every intention of capitalising on every available FIFA window and to avoid the pitfalls experienced at the Olympic qualifiers before the start of their World Cup qualifying campaign.