Alpha United head coach Wayne Dover has been lauded by Georgetown Football Association (GFA) President Troy Mendonca for his team’s success during the 2007 football season at the GT&T Cell Link Plus Premier League presentation last Wednesday.
Mendonca said that Dover had done an excellent job with the Alpha United side which retained the GFA’s Premier League title, captured the prestigious Kashif and Shanghai football crown and narrowly lost to the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) in a cliff-hanger final of the Namilco knockout tournament, all in the space of two months.
Dover himself believes that the team’s achievement had been due to hard work and dedication not only from the players but the coaching staff as well.
In an exclusive interview with Stabroek Sport, Dover, who is also the head coach of Guyana’s national squad – the Golden Jaguars, said that the team had worked tirelessly in 2007 as they set about to reach their summit.
Retaining the Georgetown premiership was one of the team’s main goals, but the 1-0 victory over Bakewell Topp XX in the Kashif and Shanghai final was overwhelming for Dover, who was a player on the victorious Beacon team when they won the title several years ago.
He now has the distinction of winning the title as a coach and as a player.
But Dover is convinced that the coaching staff had played a key role and in partnership with the other coach Kavin Pearce, Alpha United was destined for greater rewards.
Dover was recruited as head coach in 2006 while Pearce joined the coaching staff at the start of the 2007 season.
It is certainly the start of things to come for 2008 and they seem set for another impressive year having the players with the talent and skills, but more importantly their coaching staff is par excellence.
The Club’s two coaches Dover and Pearce have displayed a chemistry for success, and it all started with the Golden Jaguars, the senior national team which had a fairy-tale run in the 2006-2007 Digicel Caribbean Football Cup tournament.
Before joining Alpha United, Dover was the coach of Beacon Football Club while Pearce was in charge of Santos, where they both started as players.
Dover was first recruited as Alpha United coach at the start of the 2006 season and their goal was to win the three major national football titles that year. It sounded like an ambitious plan but Dover did devise a plan to achieve their goals and one of the main factors was hard work.
“We worked tirelessly during 2007, we realized that we were not getting enough out of training in the afternoon so night training was introduced at[the] Georgetown Football Club (GFC) ground, and this worked tremendously in our favour,” Dover remarked.
