Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz will engage the USA in the second round of action in Group A of the CONCACAF Women’s Championship inside Estadio Universitario at 6:00 pm (Est) on Thursday.
The USA are the world champion ranked at number one on the FIFA list while Jamaica, with just one trip to the FIFA World Cup Finals, are ranked 50 places below at number 51.
It is simply a “David vs Goliath” scenario, but Reggae Girlz head coach Lorne Donaldson is setting up his team to give off its best and not make it easy for the opponents.
“The number one team in the world for a long, long time, so it’s a challenge for us,” he said. “We have to go out there, we know what they are going to bring, we know their players, actually I’ve coached some of their players so I have a lot of friendship on that team, but we have to put that aside and go and compete… we will go out there and give it our best and let the chips fall where they may and we see what happens.”
Donaldson noted that Haiti, who lost 0-3 to the USA in Monday’s first-round game, made some inroads into the USA backline without finding the target, but he expects the world champions to plug those holes so he will be looking for other areas to exploit.
“Haiti had some success but I’m sure the US will make the adjustments, they know our personnel very well, so we will have to look to exploit some stuff. I’m not going to go through that right now, but we will look to do some different stuff from Haiti because I’m sure they (USA) are not going to be vulnerable to the same things as against Haiti.”
The USA lead the four-team Group A with three points, the same as Jamaica, but with a superior goal difference. The Reggae Girlz had beaten Mexico 1-0.
The Hosts Mexico and Haiti are the back markers who meet in the feature game following the USA vs Jamaica match at the same venue.
The top two teams from each of the two groups will earn automatic qualification to the 2023 FIFA World Cup Finals in Australia and New Zealand, with the third-placed team entering a play-off for another chance to book a tick to the Finals next year.
“We have a bunch of girls I call fighters, they have been in the underdog role for so long, they want to prove that they can play football, so I think they are going out there to assert themselves against a very difficult team, but we want to make it very difficult for them, and we want to try to get a result, too, that’s what we are trying to do,” added Donaldson.
Meanwhile, Donaldson was pleased with Monday’s historic result against Mexico, as he thought their game plan worked almost to perfection.
“The game unfolded the way we thought it would. We had some chances that we didn’t put away and they had a couple, but that’s what we planned for. We did a lot of work on what we thought they were going to do, exploit their weakness and we went to our strength and it worked the way we thought.”
He added: “We made one tactical change towards the end when they were pushing numbers forward when we took out Havana (Solaun) and we dropped another central midfield player a little bit deeper, but what we saw defensively (that) the (Jamaican) team was doing it would take a lot for them to score a goal.”
He saw positives to take from the game, considering that the Reggae Girlz team had only two weeks of preparation and had not played a practice game prior to facing Mexico.
“There were a lot of positives that we were in a little bit better condition training at altitude than I thought we were; the cohesion in the team in terms of defending was good, we could be a little bit better. Negative wise, with our possession game, but the Mexicans didn’t allow us to drop and keep it and swing it and do some of the stuff we wanted to do, we understand that.”
He also explained that he chose to change the game plan by not trying to play out from the back due to Mexico’s strength at pressing the ball and forcing mistakes.
“Our goalkeeper didn’t play out a lot because we know they want to press every single ball and they are at home, so we changed our tactics going into that game and said here’s how we are going to play, we are not going to do this. If they allow us we would do it but we are not to force the issue and try to create something that’s not there. Our tactics were spot on but I would love to see us at times be a little bit more patient in possession.”
