….reveals concerns in the side
GUYANA’s Head Coach of the Senior football team, Wayne ‘Wiggy’ Dover says his side will be ready come match-day one next Tuesday afternoon in Trinidad & Tobago.
Speaking to Chronicle Sport the ‘dreadlocked’ Dover who started daily sessions with the locally based players last Sunday informed that the preparation is not the ideal one going into such a critical stage of the competition.
“I would have loved to have the full squad so as to really intensify preparations and sort out the little areas that need sorting out. Due to the unavailability of the foreign based players this is not possible. I can tell you this is not the best situation but we have to work with it.”
The eleven players including captain Howard Lowe along with players who are on the fringe of National selection are engaged in the twice daily sessions at the GNS ground. Guyana is grouped with Haiti, St Vincent &the Grenadines and host T&T as they battle for two spots in the finals of the Digicel Caribbean Cup slated for Martinique later this year.
The entire Guyana squad is expected to be assembled in T&T by this coming Sunday and according to Dover the team is expected to be boosted, “another foreign based player in defensive midfielder Chris Nurse will be added to the team. Nurse plays for the Puerto Rico Islanders and because of the CONCACAF Champions League he was unavailable for the first round, but now that he should be with us in T&T I think that is a plus”.
The Coach also revealed the Coaching Staff’s concerns, “ We the Coaching staff are faced with a serious problem in that we are yet to find a quality play-maker for the team. It seems that this breed is dying out in Guyana. Every successful side has a play-maker, one who could dictate the pace and direction of the game and who can also create and score goals, the go-to man. What we have is a combination of midfielders playing that role.
The other area of worry is our poor finishing in attack. We missed too many easy chances in Suriname. It’s sad to see a player like ‘Awo’ lose his appetite for scoring and miss so many easy opportunities’.
“The other two players we used in attack, Devon Millington and Dwight Peters have displayed the ability and thirst to score and a lot is expected of them in the coming week.”
The full squad is, Locals – Howard Lowe (Capt. Alpha Utd.),Ronson Williams (Alpha Utd.), Derek Carter (Tigers), Philbert Moffatt (Alpha Utd.), Dwain Jacobs (Alpha Utd.), Dwain Alli (Tigers), Dwight Peters (Alpha Utd.), Anthony Abrams (Alpha Utd.), Devon Millington (Beacon FC) and Warren Gilkes (GDF).
The foreign-based players are – JP Rodrigues and Sean Cameron (Miami FC), Jake Newton and Chris Bourne (England), Walter Moore, Shawn Beveney and Charles Pollard (T&T) and Chris Nurse (Puerto Rico). Former national Captain Collie Hercules is the assistant Coach and Rawle Adams the Manager.
Guyana will open against Haiti on the 4th and two days later confront the host and on the 6th they clash with St. Vincent in their final encounter. All the games will be played at the Hasely Crawford Stadium.