By Neto Baptiste
Poor finishing in front of goal was Antigua and Barbuda’s Achilles heel in the just ended Concacaf Men’s Under-17 Championship Qualifiers held in Nicaragua.
This is according to the Antigua and Barbuda Football Association’s (ABFA) technical director and former national defender, Sowerby Gomes, who said that although the team was almost perfect in other areas, they lacked accuracy in front of goal, a situation that must be remedied at the training grounds.
“It means that coaches much now use the mindset in setting up their sessions, their periodisation plan. They have to spend more time in finishing because that is playing a critical part in our game and it’s reflecting on the pitch on game day, and that’s the reality. So, in the areas we are looking at like the building of a play, what you do when you regain possession, we’re doing all that well, but when it comes in the last quarter of the field when we’re supposed to be finishing — and finishing doesn’t have to be from the players who are up front because finishing is an all-out effort — so it’s something that we have to look at,” he said.
Apart from the lack of goals, Gomes said there were improvements in other key areas that he believes will only get better with time.
“We see an improvement in our technical plays and what we do when we possess the ball, how we move, but we still have to spend more time with players running off the ball to create space and opening for the players that are traveling with the ball. It will go as far back as our grassroots in the initial stage and that’s where the coaches’ education come in, because that’s where we will have to spend the time in developing the youths so we can see a more balanced approach of growth taking place,” the TD said.
The young Benna Boys scored only twice in their three encounters, beating Turks & Caicos Islands 1-0 in their second match, while drawing 1-1 with Belize in their opener on August 31. Antigua and Barbuda lost 3-0 to Nicaragua in their final contest on September 4.
Gomes said that in the end, the players gave a good account of themselves.
“Everything came right down to the wire, because here you would have had a tournament where we would have played the first game [against Belize], didn’t know what Belize was going to be like, but yet still the players came out and gave their all. In the second game, we thought we would have done much better, but guess what? If you don’t put away your chances then it is going to hurt you in the end. It came down to the final game … a game we had to win in order to come out of the group, and when we look back on this particular game there is so much learning experience we would have had from [it],” he said.
Antigua and Barbuda finished third in Group D with four points. Nicaragua finished at the top of the group with a perfect nine points from three matches, while Belize was second with four points, but a superior goal difference than that of Antigua and Barbuda.