Of­fi­cials of the Guyana Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion are prob­a­bly breath­ing a lit­tle eas­i­er, fol­low­ing news that Ja­mal Shabazz worked out a deal with the Trinidad and To­ba­go Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion that al­lows him to re­main their na­tion­al team coach. The T&T-born Shabazz guid­ed the Guyanese to the semi­fi­nal round of CON­CA­CAF qual­i­fi­ca­tion for the 2014 FI­FA World Cup in Brazil last year – but con­cern arose af­ter his tem­po­rary stint with the team came to an end. Re­ports from Port-of-Spain in­di­cat­ed that sev­er­al peo­ple in T&T were quite up­set that Shabazz had trained the Ama­zon Con­querors to the minute to con­quer his own na­tion­al team – and he had come un­der some in­tense scruti­ny. "I will con­tin­ue to work in the coach­es' ed­u­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme to ben­e­fit the lo­cal coach­ing syn­di­cate for the T&TFF," said Shabazz in an in­ter­view with the lo­cal dai­ly T&T News­day on Sun­day. "While still work­ing with the T&TFF in this ca­pac­i­ty, I am look­ing for­ward to con­tin­u­ing my tenure as the head coach of Guyana for the next stage of World Cup 2014 qual­i­fy­ing."

World Cup qual­i­fy­ing re­sumes in the Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean re­gion on June 8 this year, and the Guyanese have been drawn in Group-B of the semi­fi­nal round along­side CON­CA­CAF gi­ants Mex­i­co and Cos­ta Ri­ca, as well as El Sal­vador. Shabazz said his po­si­tion with Guyana al­so ruled him out of the job of T&T tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor, which was re­cent­ly hand­ed to An­ton Corneal. "Corneal's ap­point­ment does come at a crit­i­cal junc­ture, but he is an ide­al ap­point­ment," said Shabazz. "He is em­bed­ded in de­vel­op­men­tal tech­niques and that's the strong point to take us for­ward. "Look at the job he did with get­ting our past Un­der-20 boys to the World Cup in Egypt and now watch­ing over their progress as U-23s. Even at the U-17 lev­el, these boys were play­ing World-class teams and tour­na­ments un­der Corneal's eye."