New national football head coach should be on the job by next month

The Barbados Tridents should soon have their man.

With World Cup Qualifiers just under four months away, President of the Barbados Football Association (BFA) Randy Harris has revealed that a new head coach of the senior national men’s football team should be in place by March.

The BFA’s technical director Emmerson Boyce has been the Tridents’ interim head coach since last November, following the departure of Portugese Orlando da Costa who vacated the position after a turbulent one-year tenure in which he secured just one win in his nine games in charge.

In an interview with Barbados TODAY on Tuesday, Harris revealed that the job had drawn significant interest leading to a large number of persons applying for the position.

Concacaf recently released its schedule for the first two rounds of qualifiers for the FIFA World Cup 202 and Barbados, who has been drawn in Group C, will play their first match on June 5 against Curacao.

With that in mind, Harris told Barbados TODAY it was important that the new coach be given enough time to mesh with the players.

While he acknowledged that the BFA had been heavily criticised for the Tridents’ poor results in recent times, Harris stressed that the new head coach would not be judged on wins and losses alone.

“We are currently still searching for a head coach. We had numerous applications and we will try to make sure that we select someone who is not only concentrating about instant results, but also about development of our players,” Harris said during an interview at the BFA’s headquarters at the Wildey AstroTurf on Tuesday.

“The board of the BFA will have some discussions on the applicants and we will choose a coach. We want the coach to be in place by March so that is what we’re working towards.”

The president admitted that finding professional players of Barbadian lineage was proving to be difficult.

He explained this meant the Tridents found themselves at a disadvantage when playing internationally against teams comprised mainly of professionals.

“The truth is, we are finding it much more difficult than many of our colleagues in the region to have professional players of Barbadian lineage playing for the country and with that there is a big disadvantage.

“While the BFA is being criticised for the results, it is the clubs that develop players. What we in the BFA have decided to do is to set up an Academy later in the year. The jury is still out on whether we will start from Under-10 or Under-12, but we want to set up this Academy so that we can develop players to better understand the team concept of the game,” Harris said.

randybennett@barbadostoday.bb