We are at one with interim Reggae Girlz Head Coach Mr Xavier Gilbert in his expression of pride at the fight shown by his team while going down 1-2 to Panama in that country earlier this week.

Here were players assembled at very short notice from both sides of the Atlantic. This came after those who achieved glory in mid-year by reaching the second round of the FIFA Women’s World Cup made themselves unavailable.

As is well-known by now, the first-choice players and the governing Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) are in a bitter dispute. That’s in relation to remuneration and the JFF’s decision not to renew the contract of former coach Mr Lorne Donaldson.

The latter not only guided the Reggae Girlz to their unprecedented achievement at the FIFA World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, he was also central to their qualification in the first place.

The way Mr Gilbert tells it, the new squad of overseas and local-based players had very little time together before Wednesday’s crucial game.

That game came as part of the qualifying campaign towards the Concacaf Women’s Gold Cup. The return leg against Panama will be played at the National Stadium in St Andrew on Sunday.

“… players flew in the day and night before the match and played, and I just had to give them credit on short notice for making themselves available to come and represent Jamaica…,” Mr Gilbert told our reporter on the group’s return to Kingston this week.

Mr Gilbert has expressed the hope that Jamaica will again be able to field its best squad soon.

“To be honest, the reality is that we hope that we have the best squad to represent Jamaica at all times, and that is our objective. We just have to control what we can control, and hopefully we will have all our players available by November,” Mr Gilbert said.

That, we suspect, will only be possible if egos are tamed on all sides and good sense prevails. It won’t be easy. As is well-established, tension between the Reggae Girlz and the JFF predates the current quarrel by a long stretch.

And, while we applaud the fight shown by second-string players in Panama and we expect they will again show the strength of Jamaican womanhood in Kingston on Sunday, we cannot ignore disastrous results for a youthful, inexperienced football squad at the Pan Am Games in Chile.

Those engagements in Chile clashed with the Gold Cup qualifiers, which meant that even without the ongoing feud between top-tier players and the JFF, there would have been a largely untried football squad at the Pan Am Games. Earlier this week they fell to 0-7 and 0-10 defeats to Mexico and Paraguay — underlining extreme shortcomings in local women’s football.

Templates for improvement are evident in the hugely popular schoolboys’ league now at its height and the recently begun new season of Jamaica’s premier men’s club competition, the Wray & Nephew Jamaica Premier League.

The JFF — now in election mode — in partnership with the governing body of school sports, the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association, need to show visionary, dynamic leadership in the building of strong, vibrant local football programmes for our women and girls.