It is a case of all’s well, that ends well for head coach Hue Menzies and his Reggae Girlz team and the aim is now to build on what seems a well-laid platform.

Their debut campaign at the Fifa Women’s World Cup in France might not have gone the way they had hoped, but still there was much to celebrate and a lot to take away from their journey which was well documented in history.

After a few years of inactivity and limited funding, the Reggae Girlz, with the assistance of ambassador Cedella Marley became the first from the Caribbean to make an appearance at the global showpiece, and they captured the attention of world.

The Girlz capped off their historic journey with what was their best performance of the tournament scoring their first ever Fifa Women’s World Cup goal in a 1-4 loss to Australia in Group C at Stade des Alpes on Tuesday.

Substitute Havana Solaun found the strike in the 49th minute, as Sam Kerr helped herself to all four goals for Australia.

Menzies while lauding the performance of his team pointed to the significance of playing high quality opponents ahead of a tournament, and by extension, ensuring that the players are given every opportunity to build to together.

“Its such a great feeling knowing that your team came here and gave the effort, we just didn’t execute the way we wanted to, but we can’t stop saying how resilient this group is. it doesn’t matter what the score is we just kept playing and never stopped believing in ourselves.

“There are a lot of things that we have fixed during this World Cup and this needs to happen before the World Cup and that is something that we are going to go back to the [Jamaica Football] Federation so that we can get these quality games before we get here so we can fix a lot of things,” Menzies shared.

Menzies, along with his assistant Lorne Donaldson, took over Jamaica’s women’s programme in 2015 and since then have led the Under-17, Under-20, and more recently the senior Reggae Girlz, to top spots in Caribbean Football Union (CFU) qualifiers.

Qualifying for the World Cup through numerous adversities with little resources, having had to dip into their own pockets at times, is now at the pinnacle of their achievements, but Menzies believes there is more to be done.

“When we took on this project it was a little bit more than football, so we wanted to change a little bit of mindset about how people perceive women and the World Cup is part of this journey. If the federation feels like they need to move on then we can move on, but I want to make sure that when we leave, we leave the programme in a better situation and we feel like we have done that.

“But we are going to have a visit with the federation and see what plans they have for it (the women’s programme), but we need to do a better job of prepping for the World Cup, so that is something that we will discuss,” Menzies reasoned.

“I feel like we gave it a gallant effort and we cant go back on the kids and say they didn’t do enough. So we enjoy what we are doing, we enjoy changing lifestyle and we enjoy making an impact and we are pretty happy about where we are at right now,” he added.

Debuting at the World Cup against three of the world’s top teams in sixth-ranked Australia, 10th-ranked Brazil and 16th-ranked Italy was indeed a baptism of fire for Menzies and his Reggae Girlz.

Still, the number 53rd ranked Jamaicans managed to drive fear and even later earned the respect of all three opponents, who collectively believed that with more investment, the Reggae Girlz could prove dangerous in the next few years.

Menzies concurred as despite a 0-3, 0-5 and 1-4 losses to Brazil, Italy and Australia in that order, the Reggae Girlz team averages just over 23 years, performed creditably and should have scored more than one goal throughout the campaign.

“It just shows that we can execute and its not a matter of the goal, it was a matter of how we played. So we can come out and compete with these teams we just have to get more of these games before we get to the World Cup,” Menzies stressed.

Looking ahead to the Pan American (PanAm) Games in Lima, Peru, Menzies said the aim will be to expose more young talent to top level football at the July 26 to August 11 Games.

“We want to build a successful programme, so obviously we will go deep in the pool of players that we have and put a squad together. We will have a few of the players here who are in college to play the PanAm Games and then we will add some young players.

“But we want to give all 53 players that we have in this pool an opportunity to play at the highest level and at an international level, so we are going to take advantage of the PanAm games to do that,” the tactician ended.

— Sherdon Cowan