Head Coach Romeo Monteith says that Jamaica qualifying for the next Rugby League World Cup will be difficult but regards it as a new challenge.

Monteith guided the nation to their maiden finals appearance when the competition was held in England two years ago and included 16 countries.

But the 2026 World Cup, hosted by Australia, will see the number of finalists reduced to 10, with just two places up for grabs.

The idea is to make each game more competitive and rule out the inevitability of the full-time professional nations running up cricket scores against emerging part-time opposition.

The eight quarter-finalists from 2022 — Australia, Tonga, England, New Zealand, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Lebanon — will be joined by the top two nations from a round-robin qualifying tournament held at the end of next year.

Jamaica, who shared the limelight as eagerly studied World Cup debutantes with Greece at the last edition, must face the Cook Islands (Pacific); South Africa (Africa/Middle East); and the winners of a European group comprising France, Wales, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Monteith has been in charge of the Reggae Warriors since 2012 and says, “It will be a challenging qualification process.

“The Cook Islands will be no pushovers as they have the NRL [Australia’s premier competition] players to call on, while South Africa are the unknown factor.

“France [if they qualify] should be able to put out the strongest team, as they have two full-time professional clubs [Catalans Dragons and Toulouse Olympique].

“But if we put our strongest team on the field I think we can definitely challenge for one of the two qualifying places.”

Monteith describes the reduction in teams as extremely disappointing.

“The 16-nation competition was a better vehicle to aim towards where we want to go in terms of popularity and getting the word out there about the sport,” he said. “Changes come and sometimes they benefit you and sometimes they don’t.

“The reduction to 10 teams was obliviously necessary, but we can’t help being disappointed.

“Having mostly professional players on show is good for the representation of the sport, making more competitive matches, but the drawback is making the game less recognised globally.

“The 2022 World Cup definitely gave an increase in popularity and interest in Jamaica, and let’s not forget we had just come through COVID which stopped us playing everywhere domestically for two years.

“Looking at where we are now in 2024, we are back to where we were and playing all of our competitions, and now we have added a women’s programme.”

The women’s World Cup, running alongside the main competition and wheelchair event, features just eight nations, with Jamaica being required to get through two stages of qualification, beginning by beating the USA and Canada.

The winners of the Americas qualifying group will then participate in a ‘World Series’ with qualifiers from earlier Africa/Middle East, Pacific, and European tournaments.

The finals will be spread across Australia with rugby league and Papua New Guinea also staging some matches.