By Rawle Toney

Guyana’s National Futsal team will kick off their 2016 CFU Futsal Championship campaign on Friday, January 22 in Havana Cuba, against Curacao.

Technical Director Claude Bolton is the Head Coach for the Guyanese team which features Goalkeepers Travis Bess and Richard Reynolds, along with Konata Mannings, Eusi Phillips, Daniel Favourite, Solomon Austin, Jerome Richardson, Travis Grant, Jermain Junor and Sherwin Skeete.

Joseph ‘Bill’ Wilson will be Bolton’s assistant, and Denzel Thompson is the Goalkeeping coach. Mark Young with the team’s Manager.

Antigua and Trinidad & Tobago are the other two teams in Group ‘A’. The other group (B) consists of Cuba, Guadeloupe, Jamaica and St Maarten.

The top two teams from the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) tournament will advance to the CONCACAF Futsal Championship. The 2016 CONCACAF Futsal Championship will be held in Costa Rica in May.

Same as previous editions, the CFU Futsal tournament acts as the CONCACAF qualifiers for the FIFA Futsal World Cup. The top four teams of the tournament will qualify for the 2016 FIFA Futsal World Cup in Colombia as the CONCACAF representatives.

Guyana last participated at the CFU Futsal Tournament in 2008, finishing fourth behind winners and hosts Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti (second place) and Suriname (third place).

Bolton, who is no stranger to this format of the game, having served as Canada’s National Futsal Team Head Coach, said that Guyana’s participation at the CFU Championship “has a lot to do for us (the GFF) seeing where we are in Futsal, since we’re attempting to develop all areas of football. We’ve planned that this will grow in years and will also help the Futsal programme as we move forward.”