This post was supposed to be published yesterday, but thanks to TypePad coming out with a new and not yet fully functioning submission system, I lost the original post (which took me over an hour to write). Thanks, TypePad!I've noticed in the search of the Caribbean newspapers just how often so many match details are gotten wrong. Some have gotten the aggregate score wrong, others have the names of the players or officials wrong, and a few have totally confused the competition rules. For example,
Wednesday night's update on the 7 News Belize website gave the final score from St. Kitts-Nevis, yet gave two contradictory scores for the first leg. (To be fair, the updates are transcripts from the nightly telecasts, so it's possible that the newsreader misspoke.) Another example was the report on the St. Lucia-Turks and Caicos match on the
St. Lucia One Stop website, which read:
Saint Lucia needed
late drama to book their place in the second round. After the
Saint Lucians lost 1-0 in their first leg at Turks and Caicos,
Kenwin Mc Phee's strike on the half-hour in Vieux Fort looked like
sending the series to extra-time. But Titus Elva, who missed the first
meeting, had other ideas and popped up with another goal in the 83rd
minute to make it 2-1 for St. Lucia on the aggregate (2-0 to night).
Saint Lucia will now move on to play Guatemala in June.
But St. Lucia had lost 2-1 in Turks and Caicos, so McPhee's goal had actually placed them ahead on the away goals rule.
To me the worst example was in the Nassau Guardian's preview of the match against Bahamas and British Virgin Islands titled,
Bahamas preparing for second round of qualifying. I had to read it twice to figure out what second round they were referring to, but the reporter confused two different tournaments. Bahamas had indeed defeated Jamaica to advance to the second round...of
Olympic football qualifying. And the second round of qualifying contains 24 teams, from which come the three groups of four in the semifinal round. In the end, however, if Bahamas don't find a way to recover from their 1-1 draw, they won't have to worry about the competition rules for long.
The big sporting news in the English Caribbean has been the West Indies cricket team's loss to Sri Lanka, but the qualifiers have had some coverage in the individual countries:
- The Barbados Nation has a detailed summary of the match; a late substitution by manager Eyre Sealy made the difference in the tie. I haven't found any match reports in the Dominican papers, but you can find a preview of the match at the Dominica News Online website. It also provides a view of the state of affairs in the national FA, which is having a serious internal crisis at the moment.
- The Belize Guardian reports on the national team's historic advance to the second round against Mexico, and implores the sport's administrators to make the necessary venue renovations to host the match in Belize.
- Antigua secured what might be a Pyrrhic victory against Aruba after three of their players were sent off. It's a good indication of how poor Aruba are that they couldn't muster any offensive effort even after their opponents were reduced to eight men. The Antigua Sun has a good summary of the game with comments from the national team manager. You have to love a coach with the nickname "Pretty Boy"!
In the Spanish Caribbean, the qualifiers have been overshadowed by the start of the new Major League Baseball season. Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Día newspaper titled their report "
Por un pelo" (By a hair), an apt description of a hard-fought match featuring physical play and a lack of technical flair. It seemed that Dominican Republic were holding out for penalties, which it amazing in a knockout match against a closely matched rival. Small wonder that the report says that the match had little to remember.
El Vocero gave a more detailed summary of the match, and included quotes from national team manager (and former FC Dallas manager) Colin Clarke. Interesting news from Dominican Republic ---
Diario Libre is reporting that the football federation has filed a protest to FIFA claiming that Puerto Rico has brought on, essentially, ringers who have little family history in the country. It sounds a bit like sour grapes, but FIFA will give its verdict in four days.
In Central America, the local papers convey the contrasting moods in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Nicaraguan players returned to Managua and were received by a trio of reporters and few relatives. La Prensa describes the effort against Netherlands Antilles as
"impotent", and El Nuevo Diario acknowledges that the
Antillians were superior in every facet of the game. In El Salvador, the mood was
relaxed and the focus was shifting toward the
next set of friendlies, but there were some
voices of disappointment at the 'slender' 4-0 result.
I haven't found news reports from Netherlands Antilles or Suriname, but
Amigoe.com has a preview of the Antilles match and I imagine will place a match report there. There's also a
report in the local patois; maybe someone understands it. I can barely make out
this report on De Ware Tijd, but I think it's saying that the Surinamese National Assembly is congratulating the national team on their victory over Montserrat.
