Hurricane Irma devastates island
Hopes of a footballing re-birth are put on hold
With Dutch troops on the lawless streets of Sint Maarten’s capital Philipsburg after the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma, football is an afterthought. The new league was due to kick off in October, and would have been only the second to start since 2011, but that seems highly unlikely now.
Yet before the hurricane struck, football on the Caribbean Island had made massive strides.
“When I came four years ago there was no league, but there was indoor soccer,” says Raymond Wolff, who arrived from Holland to teach.
With no outdoor game, Wolff signed up for the RISC Takers futsal side, which kept the game alive on Sint Maarten after an XI-a-side league first staged in 1979 fell apart.
The Sint Maarten Soccer Association (SMSA) was part of the Netherlands Antilles but joined the Caribbean Football Union independently and was made a CONCACAF associate member in 2002.
When the Antilles was wound up on a sporting and political level in 2010, a FIFA working party looking at new members visited Sint Maarten. There was then no further contact from FIFA until April 2013, when Sint Maarten was surprisingly made a full CONCACAF member, along with French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Martin.
The four French territories had varying credentials and all were far superior to Sint Maarten, where a league had not been in place since 2011.
Frustrated at the XI-a-side game’s inactivity, Sudesh “Johnny” Singh – a former player, coach and referee – joined up with RISC Takers coach Sandro Garcia to start a national futsal side.
In January 2016, Singh and Garcia took a Sint Maarten futsal side to Cuba for a tournament where they surpassed expectations, scoring six goals in three games and beating Jamaica 3-2.
Despite talk of entering the 2012 Caribbean Cup qualifiers, the national team had not played an official full international since losing 3-1 to Dominica in 2000, but Singh has changed all that as well.
In March 2016, Sint Maarten played Anguilla in a friendly and won 2-0 before travelling to Grenada for the first round of qualifiers in the 2017 Caribbean Cup. Given the years of inactivity, two defeats – 5-0 to Grenada and 2-1 to the US Virgin Islands – were no disgrace.
However, normal life may need to resume in Sint Maarten before football can return to the island. Having rebuilt the game once, Singh and the SMSA must do the job once again, but funding is likely to remain difficult.
Speaking before the hurricane, Singh said: “We took part in almost all of the CONCACAF and CFU tournaments, but there is minimal to zero financial injection from government.”
Before the hurricane, the SMSA was planning a bid for membership of FIFA, which under new president Gianni Infantino now offers all members $5million every four years.
There can surely be few places in such desperate need of that money now as Sint Maarten.