TIME TO GIVE RURAL FOOTBALL SOME JUSTICE

Ihad no choice but to really sit back and take serious notice recently when a Kingston and St Andrew Football Association (KSAFA) official bluntly stated, without a clue what the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) proposal would entail, that his organisation would not support or participate in a franchise system.

To be honest, based on the selfish approach that KSAFA has embraced over the years, the sentiments expressed by the official did not come as a surprise to me. I am old enough to remember the days when if a rural player wanted to play for Jamaica, he would have to head off to Kingston to play for Boys’ Town, Santos, Cavalier or Harbour View.

In fact, I believe that if our football was operating on a level playing field in the 1970s, western Jamaica-based players like Noel ‘Bram’ King, Mark Ledford, Michael ‘Mango Beard’ Parkinson, Allan ‘Creature’ Aarons and Alton ‘Noah’ Sterling would all have had more than 100 caps for Jamaica and not the few they accumulated after they had passed their prime.

Had it not been for the robust advocacy by former St James Football Association boss Wesmore Thomas, players like star striker Paul ‘Tegat’ Davis, Winston ‘Twinny Bug’ Anglin, Devon ‘Kid’ Dunkley, Sterling, Aarons, King and the other national players, who gained national selection in the aftermath of that game, would most certainly have suffered the fate of many of their gifted predecessors did because they were not based in Kingston.

Had Allie McNab not left Montego Bay and moved to Kingston to pursue his dream of representing Jamaica, he probably would not have become the much-feared national striker he became. The same could be said of David Bernard, who left his hometown in Falmouth and quickly became a top-flight national defender after joining the army.

While it might be true that the western stars of the 1980s came to prominence through the National Premier League, which was then sponsored by Craven A, our first attempt at professional competition, which featured teams like Western Wavers and the Kingston Lions, and the annual Tanka XI versus Jamaica games also helped to showcase the players from the west.

Had those opportunities not opened up, we probably would not have had the platform that created the inspiration to motivate players like Warren Barrett, Stephen ‘Shorty’ Malcolm, Durrant ‘Tatty’ Brown, Aaron ‘Wild Boy’ Lawrence and the gifted maestro Theodore’ Tappa’ Whitmore, who became the pillars of Jamaica’s successful 1998 World Cup campaign.

FRANCHISE SYSTEM

I hope that unlike former JFF boss Captain Horace Burrell, who allowed his bid to create a franchise system to fall prey to obstruction from parochial interest in Kingston, the current JFF leadership will stand up to KSAFA and do what is right for Jamaica’s football and the marginalised players from rural Jamaica.

The rural-based members of the JFF must not allow the threats and pushback from KSAFA to continue to derail their bid to give Jamaica a football product we can all be proud of. Based on what I know of the JFF’s constitution, there are no provisions to allow KSAFA to become an independent body. It therefore means that the JFF needs to remind them of the sanctions they are likely to face should they try to pull off such a stunt.

Now that the days when the board of the JFF was jam-packed with KSAFA officials is behind us, thanks to the new FIFA governance requirements, which have placed real power in the hands of the various parish associations, the rural administrators, who are in the majority, must not buckle to KSAFA, but instead must stand up for justice for rural football.