Best of 2022: 🇩🇴 Dominican Republic stuns powers with Olympic qualification
Who would've thought the Caribbean team would seeking a medal in 2024?
This is the third in a five-part series looking back at the best moments of 2022 in the Concacaf region and what those moments mean going forward.
Monday: Canada runs the Octagonal. What does it mean for CanMNT & the region in 2023?
Tuesday: Sounders break MLS’ CCL hex
There wasn’t any real reason to have the Dominican Republic on the radar heading into the summer’s Concacaf U-20 Championship. The Caribbean country was ranked outside the confederation’s top 16 and had never gone beyond the first round in that competition.
Even the strongest nations in the Caribbean struggle at the youth level, too. Trinidad and Tobago finished fourth when it hosted the 2009 U-20 Championship.
The start of the Dominican Republic’s tournament didn’t rouse too many suspicions, either. After having to play in the qualification round because of its FIFA ranking, the DR started in the knockout stage.
Their 5-4 win over El Salvador was crazy. TUDN called it “The game of the tournament” before another game even was played.
It’s fair. The DR was off and running in the fifth minute with a looped golazo from Israel Boatwright, but El Salvador hit back four minutes later. The DR got the lead back, conceded an equalizer again and then went into the halftime down a goal.
Of the four goals still left in the game, though, the DR scored three of them to move on.
OK, so one game down and into the quarterfinals, where most Caribbean teams had struggled before.
But something weird happened. The Dominican Republic showed it could do more than just get into blowouts, shutting out Jamaica in the quarterfinals and getting another goal from Ángel Montes de Oca put them into the U-20 World Cup and the semifinals.
There, it was a furious rally with two goals in two minutes to turn a 2-0 scoreline against Guatemala to 2-2. The DR won the penalty shootout 4-3 and secured a place in the 2024 Olympics.
The final was a bridge much too far, but the Dominican Republic U-20 squad had made history as the first team from the Caribbean men’s team to qualify for the Olympics since Cuba in 1976 and 1980. Before that, Curacao did it for the 1952 games as the Netherlands Antilles. That team was backstopped by the legendary Ergilio Hato, the goalkeeper who now has Curacao’s stadium named after him.
The current crop of Dominican youngsters have a lot of work ahead of them to reach that sort of legendary status, but they already are making a name for themselves and raising expectations for their country and region along the way.