RESPECT the national team, restructure the game in Barbados, and administer football more professionally.
That’s the call from captain Norman Forde to the Barbados Football Association (BFA) if the World Cup wishes of Austin “Jack” Warner for the game in Barbados is to be realised.
“I think the BFA needs to really have a look at the football and the whole national teams. If you are going to deal with the senior national team, you got to deal with it properly. It is time the senior team get some respect that the players really deserve.
“Don’t just go and throw the team out there because sometimes we go to tournaments and we are flying blind. We don’t know what is going on. There are a whole set of issues with the team,” Forde said in a wide-ranging interview with NATIONSPORT on the team’s return home on Monday night from their first-round campaign in the Digicel Caribbean Cup in St Vincent.
Forde, 33, who has been representing Barbados for the past 15 years, said teams like St Vincent and St Kitts-Nevis were now a lot more organised than Barbados.
“You have to restructure from the top because we went away this time around and the team didn’t really look good.
“As the captain, I was really disappointed to see certain things going on around the team. I don’t think that we get the due respect from the BFA that is really owed to the team,” he asserted.
He said such an environment was not a positive one for youngsters coming into the team and many stayed away from national training.
“One time when players got called to national trials, you would find players really coming to train for the national team. Right now, the youngsters ain’t really interested in coming to national trials, so I think the BFA got to do something to motivate the guys and get them back playing serious football and get them out to national trials,” Forde said.
Forde also opined that it was non-productive to keep the national team inactive for two years and then take them up and play in a competition.
“If you really want to go forward to the next World Cup or make a serious challenge, you definitely got to get things going right at the top. We just played in a competition and I don’t know when next the national team will play,” he lamented.
When contacted yesterday, BFA’s senior assistant secretary Charles Husbands assured Forde that the association was already moving in the direction of professionalising the sport.
“That is why we are part of the Win In CONCACAF programme. The aim is to take the football to the semi-professional level so efforts are being made on improving the standard in the Premier League and youth football,” Husbands said.
He also said the BFA would definitely be looking at having more friendly internationals for the senior side ahead of the next Digicel Cup in 2012 and the qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
“The BFA will now go back to the drawing board and look at a developmental programme for the next international tournaments by having warm-up games on the FIFA international match day calendar as part of our preparation,” Husbands said.
