Following on from last season’s qualifying tournament, the inaugural CONCACAF Nations League starts this September. The format is that the 41 nations (and in this tournament, Montserrat is a nation) are split between 12 groups with the top teams in the four League A groups playing off for the Championship next year.
Montserrat has qualified for League B, and in doing so became the only team to win three of its matches and still fail to make it the Gold Cup. In the process, Montserrat became the lower-seeded team that everyone wants to avoid. Were it not for a goal in the last seconds in their match-up last year it would have been Montserrat, not El Salvador, who went to this summer’s Gold Cup. Who has Montserrat got in the season’s Tournament? El Salvador again. This time it is over two legs, the second due to take place in the 53,000 capacity Estadio Cuscatlán in San Salvador.
The Nations League takes place over three long weekends in the autumn (in September, October and November) with two games on each weekend, one home and one away. As well as playing El Salvador, Montserrat is drawn against St Lucia and the Dominican Republic. Although El Salvador will be clear favourites to win the group, and qualify for group A, they did not have a great qualifying tournament last time and were knocked out in the group stage of the Gold Cup. It is a tight group and Montserrat’s main aim will be to avoid finishing bottom and the relegation to group C that this would lead to. Matches against BVI and Anguilla are not going to attract the future talent that the squad needs.
The first weekend’s games will be played in early September with Montserrat kicking off with a home game against the Dominican Republic on 7th September, followed by a trip to St Lucia on 10th. If Montserrat can win the home game and can avoid defeat in St Lucia, they will have set themselves up well for the rest of the Tournament. Two defeats and they will struggle.
Montserrat has a small squad and their performances are always affected by the availability of players. Captain Lyle Taylor was unavailable for the last game against El Salvador due to club commitments and this could well have made all the difference. With Taylor’s club Charlton Athletic now promoted to the English Championship, the international breaks built into their fixtures should ensure the availability of Montserrat’s talisman.
The other difficulty will be travel. With a home game and an away game in each round, the Montserrat team has to travel to or from Montserrat each time they come over to the Caribbean. The first two rounds are not too bad. You would expect the senior players to fly straight back to the UK from St Lucia in September, and from the Dominican Republic in October. But in November they have a bit of a nightmare.
On the 16th November Montserrat plays the game away to El Salvador. This is followed by a possibly decisive match at home to St Lucia on 19th. It’s a journey that looks impossible on a commercial airline without an overnight stop on the way back, which will make preparation for the St Lucia game almost impossible. It looks like they’ll need a private jet, if they can find one big enough, and can afford one.
This article first appeared in the Alliouagana Express 19 August 2019
Craig Brewin’s Blog 