GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Noted Trinidad and Tobago football coach Jamaal Shabazz is calling on the head of Jamaica’s football Captain Horace Burrell to lead a new dispensation by granting more long-term access local coaches to lead national senior teams.

Shabazz made the plea during an interview with the Jamaica Observer yesterday at a press conference to preview today’s CFU Men’s Caribbean Cup 2016 round three game between Shabazz’s Guyana and Theodore Whitmore’s Jamaica inside the Leonora Stadium at 8:00 pm (7:00 pm Jamaica time).

“Back in the days as a young coach coming up watching Alvin Corneal (of Trinidad and Tobago) and Carl Brown (of Jamaica), and all of them, and seeing the way the federations deal with them, and now at 53, I’m an elder coach in the region and I’m very hurt by what they would have undergone,” Shabazz said.

“To sound like a Jamaican, ‘Mi can’t sit by and allow the next generation, the Whitmores and them, to undergo the same thing, yuh know what I mean?”

He added: “The time has come for the Caribbean coaches who have worked under many coaches from Europe and South America — and even the slaves had a period, yuh know, after the apprenticeship — the time has come for our coaches who have come out of our coaching education programmes to get the jobs. It’s more economical for a few reasons. It allows us to use the iconic nature of these ex-players who have qualified, and it generates a progress line for people coming in the future.

“When the new generation of players is coming to the end of their careers and they see how they treat us as Caribbean coaches in this disrespectful manner, they have no aspirations to become coaches and to stay in the game to contribute. And we all know how important football is to our people, just as athletics, just as cricket, sport in general, so the time has come and Captain Burrell — the elder statesman in Caribbean football — he’s the new leader in Caribbean football and what he does is mirrored by a lot of presidents in CFU (Caribbean Football Union),” continued the 53-year-old Shabazz, who is now on his third stint covering 10 years in charge of Guyana, more popularly known as the Golden Jaguars.

The outspoken Trinidadian, who had to move to nearby Guyana to take over that country’s national team, believes it’s time for local coaches to be given an equal chance and not just when it is convenient to the national federations.

Shabazz, himself, after waiting in the wings for his own country’s national call to duty and finally being given the opportunity to work with Hudson Charles in 2011, walked away in disgust a mere four months later after the two-isle republic’s football administrators decided to hire Dutchman Leo Beenhakker to lead the team to the CONCACAF Gold Cup.

That bitter personal experience aside, Shabazz has also been vexed by the apparent convenient rotation of Jamaican coaches, including Carl Brown, Theodore Whitmore, and Wendell Downswell, among others.

“We want him (Captain Burrell) now to take a more long-term stance for the Caribbean-born coaches and not just bring us in when it suits their economic passage; so economically it suits me, I bring in Theodore. We will lose the respect of the players and we want the same facilities extended (to us), the same efforts extended (to us) because why we don’t bring in general secretaries from South America and Europe and our PRO, vice-presidents and presidents from Europe and South America?

“What yardstick do we use to measure the Caribbean administrator? So the coaches are in an unfair position, and we (Guyana) are going to put our best foot forward against Theodore (Jamaica) because we want to win and them want to win. But we not getting no long-term moment to get the thing together and we deserve that because the football is a part of our life and it is a natural cycle that when a player gives his best for his country and get educated in coaching, now he needs to get an equal opportunity and we calling on Captain Burrell, not just to stand up for Jamaica, for he’s the leader and what happens in Jamaica affects all of us,” said Shabazz.

Turning to the recent messy handing of the Carl Brown attempted rehiring, Shabazz did not mince words.

“When we read the thing with Carl Brown we felt personal because I remember Carl Brown telling me as a young coach, ‘learn from the foreigners because your day will come’ and I see where I had to leave Trinidad and come Guyana for my day to come.”

Now he says his plea to the Jamaica Football Federation boss is “really just to make a statement for the Caribbean coaches because if not now, when will our time come”.

— Ian Burnett