DR Joseph Haynes has taken over the helm of football following the instalment of an Interim Management Committee (IMC) to chart the course for football in Linden within the first half of this year.
Last Saturday, President of the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) Colin Klass, accompanied by General Secretary Noel Adonis, held a meeting at the E and A Health Centre in Mackenzie, Linden, which brought to an end the life of the existing body which had been restructured in January 2009 by the GFF at a meeting with clubs at the Bayrock Community Centre, after it was felt that the elected body was not serving the purpose of promoting the game.
However, after just over a year the GFF stepped in, realising that this group, led by its president Bryan Joseph, was unable to serve in the best interest of the sport.
A decision was therefore taken by the GFF to go the route of an IMC which will have between three to five months to bring the administration of the game to a new level.
The newly installed chairman, Dr Joseph Haynes, said “The responsibility was passed on to me from the previous body to take on the challenge.
“We had meetings with the clubs and persons who had football teams and not clubs (since a majority of these club structures are not proper at the moment). And there was an agreement that this body was formed to look at restructuring the process in a maximum of five months, but we will try to do it in three months.”
The members of this IMC, apart from Dr Haynes, are Beverly McDonald who is the secretary from the previous body, Jermaine Figuiera of Net Rockers, Terrence Mitchell of Amelia’s Ward United, Sharman Solomon of Bakewell Topp XX and to be confirmed Horace James of the Linmine Secretariat.
Dr Haynes said that the aim is to bring back the confidence of the sponsors, help to structure and convert teams, which are not properly structured, into clubs, and to get tournaments and games back on the field of play.
And as the UDFA IMC settles down there is not much time on their hands to get a team to play in the Guyana Football Federation’s Under-17 Inter-Association championship which will kick off in a few weeks time.
According to Dr Haynes, “I didn’t know that we had a tournament on the heels of what we just ventured into, but that is the first thing that we have to deal with and we don’t want to be embarrassed.”
We are trying to quickly put together a team, because I don’t want to be in a losing situation right away; the previous body knew of this as the fixture was dated February 5, and we should not have been going through this. The teams should have been practising as this is over one month ago,” he added..
Dr Haynes’ view of this new unit is: “It’s a group of enthusiastic persons and the prospects look good and maybe we will have a little bit of a difficulty with the structuring. However, I believe it is very doable.