Too much football for schoolboys

THE FLOW Super Cup is living up to the precompetition hype generated by a really professional marketing blitz. The competition pits the eight zone champions in the rural daCosta Cup competition against zone champions in the metropolitan Manning Cup. The initial set of games is so arranged that it ensures that it is ‘country’ versus ‘town’. This format attracts large attendances at games and serves either to deny or confirm the widely held belief that the ‘town’ schools are better funded and coached than their ‘country’ counterparts. The organisers at FLOW, the generous sponsors of this competition (dubbed the Champions League of schoolboy football), have selected the Montego Bay-based Catherine Hall complex and Kingston-based Sabina Park as the venues to be used during this weekend competition. Good choice, as it ensures that the innate skills of the boys are given a chance to shine on a stage that will be televised and broadcast to the nation. Every genuine fan of local football has bemoaned the lack of proper playing surfaces used for different and varied competitions in Jamaica. But the hierarchy of the Jamaica Football Federation has apparently decided to concentrate the majority of its resources in (what is now confirmed as a futile attempt) to buy our way to the World Cup Finals using ‘foreign’ sources. But I digress. That is for another column. This year’s FLOW Super Cup competition has lived up to the hype, as the eight matches played over the weekend have seen the expected blowouts and, of course, an upset. The first half of every match has provided a comprehensive insight of the unbelievable talent of our youngsters. We do have good LOCAL footballers and, indeed, good LOCAL coaches!

LITTLE TIME TO RECOVER

There is really no need for ‘plastic’ Jamaicans to represent our country in international competition. But, as one would expect in any football match, the second 45 minutes of the matches seen on the weekend provided evidence that our young boys are just playing too much football. Manning Cup, Walker Cup, daCosta Cup, Ben Francis Cup, Oliver Shield and FLOW Super Cup mean that the better schoolboy footballers have very little time to (a) recover and (b) pay the requisite attention to the whole purpose of school, which is to get an education that will equip them to be productive citizens once school is over. The many stops for cramps, injuries and inexplicable technical lapses of youngsters (who earlier in the season were guaranteed to put away simple goalscoring opportunities), can only be explained by exhaustion, mentally and physically. Professional footballers in the very popular English Premier League protest in no Jamaica College’s Donovan Dawkins wards of a challenge from Clarendon College’s Donovan Noble during their FLOW Super Cup match last Saturday. Clarendon College won 1-0.