TUCKER, St James — Montego Bay United’s veteran midfielder Dwayne “Stebbe” Ambusley has decided to hand up his boots following his team’s relegation from the Red Stripe Premier League (RSPL).

He was the lone link between the team and its predecessor, Seba United.

The midfielder played for the then Seba United in the Western Confederation, and was part of the team that won the Jamaica Football Federation’s Premier League play-offs in 2010-11 season. He played seven seasons for MBU in the RSPL.

“Definitely this is the end for me,” a visibly dejected Ambusley told the Jamaica Observer West recently, after MBU lost at home to Portmore United, confirming their demotion.

“I had planned from the start of the season that this would be my final season,” he said, adding that he did not plan to play as much as he did.

“But because of situations I had to do more and in my own self-assessment, I did myself proud in terms of going through the entire season, and I knew that I didn’t have to put myself through all this, but that’s football, so I played a lot more than I had planned to initially,” Ambusley explained.

Ambusley, who played on the MBU team that qualified for three straight finals, winning two, was part of the ‘highs and the lows’ of the St James-based team.

“You tried and at the end of the day you know you did your best, but at the end, it was not good enough, but what can I do?,” he questioned.

The 38 -year-old cited poor defending as the main problem for the team “from the start of the season and it never got better”.

“All season-long the defence has been the problem, we had a poor defensive record and it came back to haunt us,” he said of the team that allowed a club record 55 goals in their 33 games played.

“To try to sum up the season, it was tough for us from the very start, players coming back late and players being injured, and we didn’t do well in either transfer windows, neither in August, nor in January, but we tried hard in every game.”

In retrospect, Ambusley said the run with MBU was a very good one.

“I have had a good career with MBU, now I have to make the next move, football has been my life and I need to make the move into coaching full time,” he said.

“It’s not the end of the world, teams go down and teams come back up. When I joined Seba they were in the Super League and I helped them to get to RSPL, and we lived the dream, two titles, it has been a full cycle.”

Noting that there are a lot of sad feelings across the western end of the island due to MBU’s relegation, he argued that “football has not ended and there needs to be more planning to go onto getting a team back in to the RSPL”.

“I feel sorry for the young players in the team. I feel really, really sorry for them, I can’t even look at some of them right now because of the way I am feeling, and I know they are hurting, it’s tough, but we will return,” he argued.