June deadline for completion of Premier League, says JFF’S Anderson
VICE-PRESIDENT of the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) and head of the competitions committee Raymond Anderson has set a deadline of June 2021 for the end of the 2020-2021 Premier League season in Jamaica, this despite a start date not yet decided on.
Anderson explained that the competitions committee has been hard at work to ensure that fixtures are in place for whenever the competition starts, and if needs be, adjustments would be made accordingly.
“We have a competitions committee that really fixtures is a part of it, but the committee is not only for fixtures. If you don’t plan ahead of things you will end up directly to fail, so whatever you have to do, although you don’t have a competition start, you have to plan in place that’s when the competition starts the plan will actually start to activate.
“You have to have a fixture in place and what we will have to do is change the date when we get the approval,” he said.
Anderson is very wary of the amount of time left to work with as each month and each week passes by without an agreement for the return of football. He made a special appeal to the Ministry of Health and Wellness (MOHW) to allow football to restart before the end of 2020.
“We are really appealing to the powers that be to give us a chance to really exercise what we know best in terms of trying to manage a fixture, starting from sometime this year and try to finish by June the latest,” Anderson said.
Anderson fears a fixture congestion as a June completion is paramount to the winning clubs participating in Concacaf competitions.
“June will be the deadline, so whenever we start we will really run in some problems if we don’t really get to start on time, to finish the fixtures on time or we will have to compress the fixtures.
“It can’t go beyond June because you have to start another season and you want to ensure that the winner and the second place, and hopefully the third place, want to compete in another competition, the regional competition. So, if you finish, for example July or August, you might end up can’t really enter that competition.
“Every team wants to ensure that they finish on time to get a chance to qualify and to enter into the other competitions, so we really have to adhere to deadlines,” he explained.
Anderson says that he would be asking the clubs to be accommodating in order to complete a full fixture list, regardless of the time in which they would be operating.
“The teams would be encouraged and called upon to play more games in a shorter period of time and I hope they’ll understand, and we will have to look somewhere, how we can condense the competition, maybe some Wednesdays.
“Based on the fixtures that we have now, there was no Wednesdays unless they were rescheduled [games], but now you might have to look at during the week to really finish the fixtures on time. I really have to emphasise ‘on time’ because it’s really important,” Anderson explained.
When pressed for a possible start date, the JFF executive shied away from making a commitment.
“I don’t want to put another date because we have been shifting dates over a period of time, but it’s because we are planning why we can really shift the dates.
“I’m hoping that based on the discussion I had with President [Michael] Ricketts today [Tuesday] and the discussions that he had with the Ministry of Health and the minister himself, he penned a letter to him again, telling him how important it is for us to try and start before the year finishes,” noted Anderson.
One day after Anderson’s appeal, the Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton said the Government would not approve the return of team sports to the island for the rest of the year.