Alvin Corneal

Ja­maica, in my in­ter­pre­ta­tion, is win­ner des­ig­nate of the Dig­i­cel Caribbean Cup. For­get the Fi­fa rat­ings, fo­cus on the qual­i­ty of play demon­strat­ed by the Caribbean ter­ri­to­ries dur­ing the past week in Mar­tinique. Af­ter the acid test of hav­ing to qual­i­fy from the group se­ries to the Fi­nals, these eight teams had some lev­el of pride when they were among those left in the com­pe­ti­tion. They had some ex­tra time to fine tune their charges and face a va­ri­ety of sys­tems of play from their op­po­nents. As ear­ly as the first day in each group, it was clear that the sep­a­ra­tion was tak­ing place rapid­ly and mak­ing room for the best turned out teams to show their ware. Cu­ba made no bones about throw­ing down the gaunt­let in a ring of three hope­fuls, who were as­pir­ing to qual­i­fy for the semi­fi­nals and sub­se­quent­ly the fi­nal.

Grena­da was again at­tempt­ing to be the "fly in the oint­ment" in the same way that it did in the last Dig­i­cel tour­na­ment when it de­feat­ed T&T. Mar­tinique spent six weeks in France train­ing and play­ing match­es against club teams. It then re­turned home and en­gaged six lo­cal club teams in friend­ly bat­tle, while the So­ca War­riors marched in­to Fort Du France with a promise from coach Rus­sel Lat­apy that the team will win the tour­na­ment. Sure­ly, his team's suc­cess in the pre­lim­i­nar­ies in­cit­ed the com­ment af­ter their fine vic­to­ries over Guyana, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines and Haiti. In five days time, the pic­ture was taint­ed by a mas­ter­ful Cu­ba and an en­thu­si­as­tic Grena­da whose game plan was not filled with emp­ty promis­es but with an "on the field" per­for­mance which lent it­self to years of hard work, com­mit­ment to the task and strat­e­gy which was based up­on their strengths and weak­ness­es.

The Trinidad-born Grena­di­an coach Franklyn "Nat" Simp­son took the host coun­try to the wire for a 1-1 draw af­ter scor­ing first, and fol­lowed their open­ing show by de­feat­ing T&T, the high­est rat­ing Fi­fa team in the re­gion. They would have won many more friends if they had act­ed pro­fes­sion­al­ly against the Cubans and cast aside the easy route of sit­ting in a com­fort zone against Cu­ba, who had al­ready qual­i­fied by de­feat­ing both T&T and Mar­tinique, the lat­ter be­ing a feisty dis­play which end­ed with two red cards for (Fi­del) Cas­tro's men. Some 60 kilo­me­tres away the Reg­gae Boyz of Ja­maica made no mis­take about their in­ten­tion. They were there to win the group and by ex­ten­sion, the tour­na­ment. The ini­tial ex­er­cise has been com­plet­ed as they swept aside An­tigua/Bar­bu­da, the French Is­land Guade­loupe, and Guyana in a man­ner that sug­gest­ed to­tal dom­i­nance in every de­part­ment of the game.

Coach Theodore Whit­more was on show with his well equipped squad of ball artists wend­ing their way through crowd­ed de­fences, link­ing pass­es with the ease of a well-oiled ma­chine. Al­ready, there are those who are op­ti­mistic of see­ing this squad wipe aside Grena­da in the semi­fi­nal and await their next vic­tim, ei­ther one of Guade­loupe or Cu­ba. My bet is Guade­loupe, a qual­i­ty team con­sist­ing of su­per ath­leti­cism, ef­fi­cient crafts­man­ship and play­ers who un­der­stand their roles and avoid los­ing shape. They have been to the Gold Cup on the last oc­ca­sion and seem des­tined to re­turn, to­geth­er with Ja­maica. The Reg­gae Boyz are the kings of Caribbean foot­ball. That is not games, its sport and foot­ball to be clear. Maybe its too far away to make pre­dic­tions about Brasil 2014 but don't rule them out of that trip to the Fi­fa Fi­nals. But they will be the first to tell us that each hur­dle must be crowed care­ful­ly. The first is the Gold Cup, then the Con­fed Cup and let the chip fall where they will.