Whether or not Guyana’s Golden Jaguars are good enough to make it to the 2010 football World Cup finals in South Africa, the launch earlier this month of a local World Cup Committee is a commendable development, deserving of more than a modest measure of praise.
The advent of the World Cup Committee is at least an acknowledgement that local football is a national asset worthy of more than the cursory attention from which it has benefited up until now. The Committee includes representation from the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) but appears to be driven primarily by a group of overseas-based Guyanese who. presumably, possess an appreciation of the national gains to be derived from the international ‘branding’ of the Golden Jaguars.
What the recent achievements of the Golden Jaguars have done for the local game as a whole ought not to be underestimated. Football has long been a neglected stepchild of national sport and the game has also had to endure the burden of a patent lack of administrative competence that has further depressed its growth and development. And if the performance of the Golden Jaguars in last year’s DIGICEL tournament have not completely transformed the fortunes of the national game, they have at least provided the sport with a modest impetus which has served to raise hopes that the game can, after all, elevate itself above the doldrums in which it has long been languishing. In fact, it can be argued that the decision to establish the local World Cup Committee was influenced much more by the recent performances of the Golden Jaguars than by any initiative deriving from the local institutions of the game.
While the marketing slogan embodied in the World Cup Committee initiative targets South Africa 2010, a more plausible explanation for the advent of the Committee is the promotion of the Golden Jaguars as a commodity worthy of being sold to thousands of expatriate Guyanese football fans who eagerly await the opportunity afforded Trinidadian and Jamaican counterparts by the Reggae Boys and the Soca Warriors, respectively, to have something to shout about.
Much of the problem with local football inheres in its preoccupation with controversy over issues that invariably have to do with personal differences between and among the game’s bureaucrats.. These controversies count for sorry little as far as the advancement of the game is concerned. Indeed, more often than not, they have to do with a cynical jockeying for authority among the ‘movers and shakers’ in the game.
Building a strong national football structure that can properly support football and enhance its value as a national resource has to be preceded by a ‘doing away’ with those puerile controversies that clutter the game.
But building the local game from ‘ground up’ requires much more than the removal of the controversies that currently encumber it. That task necessitates an infusion of informed vision, consummate managerial skills and considerable material resources into the running of the local game. If the truth be told none of these are in abundance evidence within the institutions of the game at this time.
The crisis is made worse by the prevalence of a decadent narrow-mindedness that has spawned a condition of turfdom within game. What this turfdom postulates is an altogether fallacious and, frankly, absurd argument that only those who are directly involved with the game at the administrative level, has the prerogative to make critical comments about its progress. This argument is based on a questionable assumption that ‘knowing the game’ is an indispensible criteria for contributing to the creation of those critical management structures which alone can lift it out of its current doldrums.
If it will take years for us to lift the standard of local football to those of the global power centres of the game including Europe, we can at least begin to learn now from the preoccupation of the big clubs and the institutions that manage the game with competent management which, frequently, has more to do with a capacity to build structures for the good of the game and less to do with what is loosely described here as ‘knowing the game.’
Vision is everything. The unfolding progress of the local game must be underpinned by a holistic blueprint that sets specific goals for the development of football both in terms of creating the physical and institutional structures to support the actual playing of the game as well as a structured regime for the identification and nurturing of talent. These must be interwoven into targets that envisage the incremental development of the game over time, a logical progression that seeks to take the local game into the ‘big time.’ There are, of course, no guarantees that envisaged targets will be met. What is guaranteed, however, is that where there is no vision there is no possibility whatsoever that the game will go forward.
A point has long been reached where calls by the media and by critics of the local ‘setup’ for radical changes to the structure of football administration in Guyana can no longer be responded to with the argument that the critics of the football establishment ‘know nothing about the game.’ Nor is it sufficient to chastise the media’s ‘ignorance’ and ‘lack of research.’ These responses are sometimes designed to do no more than evade the real issues.
Most people who love football with a passion – and here I include myself – probably do not ‘know the game’ in the sense that those who profess to know it use the expression. What cannot be denied, however, is that in the final analysis it is the passion of fans coupled with the skills of the players that makes the game the spectacle that it is.
