TUCKER, St James — With the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying series set to resume later this month, the Reggae Boyz coaching staff has sought to strengthen the offensive thrust of the team by including several strikers in the squad.

After an anaemic performance against minnows Nicaragua in the previous round where the Caribbean champions and beaten CONCACAF Gold Cup finalists just managed to scrape through by the slimmest of margins, former youth captain Dever Orgill has earned a recall while Birmingham City’s 31-year-old striker Clayton Donaldson has also earned a first call-up.

Conspicuous by his absence, however, is Montego Bay United’s Dino Williams who has scored 10 goals in 10 matches in the Red Stripe Premier League and who was part of the squad that took part in the Copa America in Chile in July, but was dropped afterwards, while his two teammates Allan Ottey and Jermaine Woozencroft have been included in recent national teams.

Timothy Hankinson, coach of Montego Bay United, thinks that while Coach Winfried Schaefer should be trusted to make the best decisions with the player pool available to him, he thinks Williams should be part of the equation.

“Every coach has his vision how he wants his team to play,” Hankinson told the Jamaica Observer last week. “And the choices the national coach has, both in Europe and here in our national league, he may have some other players that he favours and therefore players like Woozencroft and Ottey are wingers and not playing at the same role as Dino, so you have to give the judgement of the national coach based on his player pool,” said the American.

Hankinson is not the only coach who is in awe of the 25-year-old Williams, as Spaniard Carlos Garcia, who guided Montego Bay United most of last season and who is involved in the national coaching set-up as a video analyst, described Williams as “the best player in the Red Stripe Premier League”.

Hankinson, who has practised his trade in far-flung countries as well as in American Major League Soccer, said Williams has a quality that most strikers in the world lacks — scoring goals.

“There are hundreds of thousands of players that are on team rosters at all levels (that) have striker next to it, but there are very few goal-scorers,” he said. “Maybe of the 100 per cent of the possible strikers in the world at all level, Series A and the English Premier League included, only five per cent maybe are actual goal-scorers, and Dino is a goal-scorer,” he declared.

Among the qualities that Williams brings to the game, Hankinson said, is that “he plays the role of a striker, the target man, he brings players forward”.

“But he also has the great quality of picking out a piece of the net that most other strikers can’t,” he noted

Williams, according to Hankinson, is at a crucial juncture of his career where he must make his mark. “He (Williams) is in the prime of his career right now, he is 25… this is the moment his game has to impact the country and I certainly hope he will get the opportunity with the season he is having,” Hankinson said. “There is certainly no reason not to think he won’t be re-invited for opportunities down the road.”