DESPITE winning a third-straight game and advancing to the final round of Concacaf World Cup qualifying, Jamaica’s Head Coach Steve McClaren admitted he and the team were not happy with their 1-0 win over 207th-ranked British Virgin Islands (BVI) in their Group E game played at AO Shirley Recreation Ground in Road Town.
Warner Brown’s second goal in Jamaican colours was enough for the Reggae Boyz to take a big step towards qualifying for the FIFA World Cup to be hosted by the USA, Canada and Mexico next year. Jamaica share the lead with Guatemala, who they will host at the National Stadium on Tuesday to close the round.
Guatemala leads on superior goal difference, with both teams on nine points, and McClaren warned that they cannot expect to play as they did yesterday if they expect a good result against the Central Americans.
While admitting his players might have gone into the game with “a little bit of complacency”, McClaren said they had not built on the two good performances against Trinidad and Tobago and Nigeria during the Unity Cup in London a week earlier.
“We’ve done well in the previous two games in terms of performance and results,” he said. “We didn’t follow it up today. [The] most biggest disappointment for me was that we never followed the performance that we had last week.
“We’ve got to win the game and got to find a way to win. And we would have won the game 1-0 but we knew inside the dressing room that we can be better, and we need to be better next week against Guatemala,” McClaren told the media in the BVI. “With the Gold Cup coming up we’ve got to be better than we were today in terms of, I would say, attitude. But maybe we came here with a little bit of complacency, and that showed in our slow play.”
Repeating again that there are no easy games in Concacaf and citing Honduras’s close win over the lowly ranked Cayman Islands, McClaren said they were all disappointed.
“But that’s football — there is no easy games in the Caribbean, we know that,” he said. “We knew that against St Vincent and we know that again today. The key thing was, in St Vincent we got the draw, and here we’ve got the win. We have to learn from this…and we have to move on quickly because Guatemala will be a totally different proposition — and we need to be a better performance if we’re to win that one.”
The biggest takeaway from the game, McClaren said, was getting the win and three points to qualify for the next round.
“That was most important, and now we need to turn our attention to Tuesday against Guatemala,” he said, adding that Jamaica’s finishing on Saturday was what mostly let them down.
“Everybody thinks we should beat them by five or six. We had five or six chances to do that but our finishing was very, very poor. We need to improve that as well.
“To move the ball quicker, more movement up front, we were a bit static. We got enough opportunities but once we had the opportunity to put the ball in the box and make sure our rest defence was right — because that was their only threat and I think we did that — but our final ball, our final cross, our final finish was not very good today.
“The game plan was to not be complacent, make sure we score the first goal and then make sure you follow that with the second goal. That makes life a lot easier, and you control the game, but we failed to do that. So in terms of opportunities in our finishing we were poor today but in general, you know, we came here to win the game, to score goals, to attack, to get more crosses into the ball, more bodies into the ball, get better finishing. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”
Against a young and mostly inexperienced BVI team, Jamaica were expected to dominate the game. And while having, by far, most of the ball possession, they were unable to break down a stubborn and disciplined defence despite losing all four games played at this level — the furthest they had ever been in World Cup qualifying.
Demarai Gray, who was one of five changes to the starting team made after the Unity Cup, set up the game’s only goal when his free kick from the edge of the 18-yard box on the left side was glanced past 19-year-old goalkeeper Frankie Beckles by Brown.
Romario Williams, who come on in the second half, had two good chances to add to the tally, hitting the far-right upright in the 70th minute before firing just wide nine minutes later after a swift counter-attack.
Goalkeeper Andre Blake was called on to make one save, in the 78th minute, when Tyler Forbes managed to get past the Jamaican defence.