🇯🇲 Can Jamaica end its decade-long trophy drought without banned Bailey?
PLUS: Happy birthday Getting CONCACAFed, the Conca-catch-up & a Liga MX update
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OK, let’s talk about Jamaica, then move into a quick Conca-catch-up & break down the Liga MX weekend
The last time the Jamaica men’s national team lifted any sort of hardware it was 2014.
The Reggae Boyz topped regional rival Trinidad and Tobago in a penalty shootout to win their sixth Caribbean Cup. It’s fair to say some things have changed since then in the international soccer landscape.
That tournament no longer exists, and the one Jamaica is two matches away from winning hadn’t been invented yet. There are, however, some parallels between that team from 10 years gone by and today’s squad.
The Caribbean Cup win qualified Jamaica for the 2016 Copa América Centenario, the South American championship taking place in the United States. With a foreign coach carving through the federation chaos, Jamaica was considered a team on the rise. New recruits playing their soccer in England and other European countries were helping to bolster the squad.
In other words, what’s old is new again for Jamaica and things feel the same, other than the fact that it hasn’t been able to add any trophy to its case for a decade.
Since Jamaica reached the World Cup in 1998, the Reggae Boyz have continually been highlighted as a team on the rise and continually have failed to fully reach the potential they have when looking at their player pool on the island and the number of top players eligible thanks to Jamaican ancestry.
When Iceland native Heimir Hallgrímsson arrived, Jamaica was treading water.
He started his Jamaica tenure with an eight-match winless run but engineered a run to the Gold Cup semifinals, then a strong Nations League campaign with a win and a draw against Haiti followed by a bonkers 3-2 win in Canada to secure passage on away goals after the quarterfinal series ended 4-4.
“We definitely deserve to be here. Nobody can say different. I think it’s where we are at the moment,” Hallgrímsson told me this month. “Hopefully we can build on what we’ve done and continue to have a good performance against the U.S.
“When you’re in a semifinal, everybody’s looking at the trophy. Of course you want to go to the final and win the trophy. That’s no different for Jamaica. I know, on paper, the others look more likely to win and have more tradition.