‘If you don’t perform, you have to go’
Peter Moses, Bradley Stewart give views on Whitmore job security
Published:Tuesday | September 7, 2021 | 12:10 AMRobert Bailey/Gleaner Writer
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Football administrator Peter Moses said national senior men’s football team head coach Theodore ‘Tappa’ Whitmore should be fired if the team does not win its next FIFA World Cup qualifying match against hosts Costa Rica in San José tomorrow night....
Football administrator Peter Moses said national senior men’s football team head coach Theodore ‘Tappa’ Whitmore should be fired if the team does not win its next FIFA World Cup qualifying match against hosts Costa Rica in San José tomorrow night.
The Reggae Boyz are at the bottom of the eight-team group on zero after two defeats in as many games.
They were beaten 2-1 away in Mexico on Thursday then 3-0 at the National Stadium by Panama on Sunday.
“He has to get it right, not only for himself but for the programme,” Moses told The Gleaner. “Money for football is not an easy thing to come by. I know that from personal experience.
“Look at [René] Simões (former national technical director, who qualified Jamaica for the World Cup in 1998). Simões went to the World Cup and everybody zeroed in, and his second time around Captain [Horace] Burrell (then Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) president) fired him because he wasn’t getting the results and this is the man who took the country to history.
“Once you want to get into that arena, you have to understand both as a player and a coach that if you don’t perform, then you have to go. It’s nothing personal, because if I am running a company and the company is not performing, they would get rid of me.”
Moses says much depends on this Reggae Boyz team because once the side does well there will be more resources that can be easily garnered for other developmental programmes within the JFF.
“The success of this programme is tied also to the success of the local programme, and when you are dealing with big corporate money, don’t come and tell me we had a good try and they hype about this World Cup and how well we are going to do,” he said. “We have to deliver, and if you don’t deliver, you have to look at other things — the administration, coaching, the players and everything and say, ‘Well okay, maybe we need to start at the youth level and rebuild again.’
“Maybe we need to cut down on the reliance on overseas players because they don’t blend. We can’t just bring them all together on a flight and then just put eight of them out there to play.”
However, Bradley Stewart, a former assistant coach to Whitmore, disagrees with Moses and he says Whitmore should be given more time to turn the results around.
“I don’t think he should be fired,” Stewart said. “I think that any coach that you put in the system now is going to be worse off than Whitmore because he has personal knowledge of a high percentage of the players and he has a large majority of this group for a long time.”
Whitmore made eight changes to the team for the Panama game on Sunday.
Stewart says he was very surprised by this move and says he does not believe that Whitmore was the one who made these changes.
“I personally don’t think that he was fully in charge of the team for the last game, because you have to be crazy to change a team that drastically,” he said.