…GFF president cautions Regional members on premature speculation

By Rawle Toney

WAYNE Forde, president of the Guyana Football Federation, believes that changes to CONCACAF’s 2022 World Cup qualification process is foreseeable, as football, specifically at the International level, continues to battle with finding ways to return to the field, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Until FIFA announces how it plans to get through the qualification process, the only things that appear certain is that changes to the format are inevitable,” Forde told Chronicle Sport in an exclusive interview yesterday.

Concacaf president Victor Montagliani, in a recent interview with OneSoccer’s Gareth Wheeler, noted that the far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to reshape Concacaf qualifiers for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

Under normal circumstances, Concacaf was set to host two qualifying formats in the buildup to 2022, with one being familiar and another entirely new.

The former would be the Hexagonal, combining the confederation’s top-six ranked nations based on the FIFA World Rankings published after the June 2020 window. The latter would take Concacaf nations ranked 7-35 from the same rankings and advance through a group-stage format that leads to one country facing the fourth-place finisher of the Hex to determine the Concacaf representative in the FIFA intercontinental playoff.

However, Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) general secretary Dalton Wint, in an article published in the Jamaica Gleaner, said that any potential changes to the Concacaf hexagonal round for the FIFA World Cup qualifiers could present challenges to the nation’s aim of qualifying for Qatar 2022.

“It might be disadvantageous to us (Jamaica),” Wint had stated, while reasoning that “It depends on how the fixtures are set up because we do have a plan in our heads that we are approaching corporate Jamaica with, and that is to play 10 games. If we are having more games with a shorter time, then you might have some difficulty in acquiring the services of your best players, the facilities that you might need may not be available to you if you have more games, and the timeline in which to complete these things could cause us not to be prepared as properly as we would have wanted.”

But Forde told Chronicle Sport that Concacaf, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will lose all the dates in March and June that was identified on the FIFA window, adding that “this will have a huge impact on all six Confederations’ calendar and certainly on the 2022 format. I, however, believe it is premature to speculate on what shape these changes will take.”

Forde is adamant that “FIFA and Concacaf will ensure that sporting integrity remains the cornerstone of the final decision, which simply means that results of the field will ultimately determine who qualifies.”

The GFF president went on to encourage everyone within the Concacaf region to remain patient “and resist the temptation to speculate prematurely. The COVID-19 pandemic is not over and until the health authorities of countries across the world gain the upper hand on this battle, things will remain very fluid.”

While not speaking specifically on what the changes will be, Montagliani hinted that they will “have to use FIFA rankings to start somewhere because that’s the reality of our confederation. In terms of having 35, which is a weird number to start with – I wish we had a better number; it would make it a little easier for groups. So, you’re going to have to do some sort of elimination process and then eventually get into some group-stage process. But, I don’t know that yet until we know what the FIFA calendar is going to look like.”