Reggae Boyz head coach Paul Hall has included Jamaica Premier League leading goal scorer Atapharoy Bygrave and schoolboy football standouts Tarick Ximines and Christopher Pearson in Jamaica’s 24-man squad for the last three CONCACAF World Cup Qualifiers.
The trio is among a dozen locally-based players included in Hall’s squad for games against El Salvador on Thursday, away to Canada three days later and back home against Honduras on March 30.
Bygrave plays for Dunbeholden Football Club and currently leads the goalscoring race with nine strikes, including Monday’s winner against Humble Lion FC in the presence of Hall.
Pearson was a member of Kingston College’s winning Manning Cup and Olivier Shield teams. He currently plays for Cavalier FC in the Jamaica Premier League, while Ximines represented beaten Manning Cup finalist Jamaica College, and is now a member of Harbour View’s premier league team.
The Reggae Boyz have already been eliminated from qualifying for the Qatar World Cup Finals slated for later this year. With just three games remaining in the CONCACAF qualifiers, Jamaica sit in seventh position on seven points.
The eight-nation final round qualification series is headed by Canada on 25 points, followed by the US and Mexico on 21, with Panama next on 17, Costa Rica (16), El Salvador on nine and Honduras at the rear of the field on three points.
The top three teams gain automatic berths to Qatar, with the fourth-placed team earning another chance via an Inter-continental play-off.
Hall replaced sacked former head coach Theodore Whitmore at the end of the November series of games but lost his three games in the competition.
But the France 1998 World Cup star is not deterred as he looks to the future, aided and abetted by the Jamaica Football Federation’s decision to conserve scarce financial resources required to accommodate the professionals from all across the globe.
“For 20 however long years we have been trying to do the same thing, now we need to draw a line somewhere and we need to show improvement,” Hall told the media on Monday.
“But that’s not going to happen overnight, so yes, we don’t want to come seventh, we don’t want to come eighth, yes you do want to win games, but we’ve got to understand what’s the importance here. What people say or can we get Jamaica into a place of where we used to be?”
He continued: “I would like to be judged on how much we can grow Jamaica’s football in the long term, so if you have to lose a couple of games in the early days, fine, and if people would like to say Hall should go because he lost a couple of games, fine.
Half of Hall’s Reggae Boyz squad ply their trade overseas with captain Andre Blake, as well as Leon Bailey, Ravel Morrison, veteran Adrian Mariappa and Damion Lowe being included.
And in another philosophical twist, Hall is willing to gamble on gaining positives for the future even if defeat is the final result.
“If we say that we lost against Costa Rica, we didn’t lose, we got Richard King. That was a win for me because we got a young 20-year-old player who has got undoubted potential. That’s a win for me!”
The coach justified his inclusion of some of the locals as purely developmental. “They have to go on a programme, just like you were in a gym. You go on a programme. We have to get individual programmes for these guys based on their individual needs.”
The full list includes Andre Blake, Dillon Barnes, Amal Knight, Damion Lowe, Richard King, Dwayne Atkinson, Adrian Mariappa, Javain Brown, Gregory Leigh, Alex Marshall, Jamoi Topey, Demar Rose, Ravel Morrison, Nicholas Nelson, Christopher Pearson, Ricardo Thomas, Ramone Howell, Daniel Green, Tarick Ximines, Atapharoy Bygrave, Leon Bailey, Andre Gray, Devon Williams, Lamar Walker.
