Teenage goalkeeper Liya Brooks admitted to being nervous when she made her debut for the senior national women’s football team in the first game of their two-match international friendly series against South Africa at the Montego Bay Sports Complex last Friday.

Brooks, who had represented Jamaica in the Under-17 and Under-20 teams and was the third goalkeeper at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia last year, was thrust into the starting role because starting keeper Rebecca Spencer fell ill.

Brooks, 19, says she expected to see some playing time with just two goalkeepers invited to the camp.

“So I felt like my mental was a little more like, ‘Make sure I’m ready, make sure I’m prepared’,” she said.

With Spencer not being able to take her place in goal, Brooks says Head Coach Hubert Busby reassured her.

“He was telling me that I’ve got the team behind me and that I’ve prepared,” she said. “I’ve been with this team for a couple years now, so I know that everything that I’ve been doing with them has led me to this moment, and knowing that I had 10 other girls on the field with me that had my back no matter what made it so much easier.”

Brooks eventually played both games that Jamaica won 3-0 and 3-2 and her only error came at the end of the second game after Jamaica had come back from a goal down to lead 3-1, she fumbled a ball that resulted in South Africa cutting the deficit to one goal.

She shared her feelings about getting her first start.

“It was like a weight lifted off my shoulders, a little bit,” she said at a press conference after the game on Monday. “Obviously, I am still quite young and it’s been a while since I have played a full 90 minutes. Going into the first game, I was really nervous, just because I hadn’t played against a real opposition with my team.

“But I knew they had my back. I had their back and basically I was just like, ‘You do your job, I do mine, and we’ll work together going to the second game a little less nervous, but still new. So it’s just about moving on, moving forward. It’s just about getting comfortable and learning my teammates individually, and they learn me.”

Brooks is however fully aware of the areas of her game that she needs to work on as she tries to get better at her craft.

“I’ll start with the positive first,” she said. “I’ll say that I feel like my communication with my team is quite solid, and I feel like that’s probably the most important thing. Obviously, you have to keep the ball out the back of the net but if you’re not communicating with your teammates and they don’t know what to do, what’s going on behind them, what’s going on in front of them, then they can’t really do much with what they have.

“I would say this, these specific two games, I don’t think I had a clean catch and honestly, I’ll chalk it up to being nervous. I was quite nervous, because that’s just something that’s not quite common for me, but I will say, I guess my mindset during a game is probably what I need to work on, to make sure that I’m locked in and focused for every ball, every ball played back, and just making sure that I take time and breathe and live in the moment to know that I’m confident in what I’m doing out there.”