KINGSTON, Ja­maica – Head coach of Ja­maica’s Un­der-14 foot­ball team, Vas­sell Reynolds, said he was not sat­is­fied with their per­for­mance in the fi­nal of the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed CFU Boys’ U-14 Chal­lenge Se­ries, which saw them go down 4-0 to Haiti.

The de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons en­tered the fi­nal with a per­fect record in their four games and had not con­ced­ed a goal, but were thor­ough­ly out­played by the Haitians in the 35-minute-per-half ti­tle match.

While Reynolds con­ced­ed that Haiti was a strong side, he said he ex­pect­ed a bet­ter per­for­mance from his charges.

“To have lost by the mar­gin we did was dis­ap­point­ing, es­pe­cial­ly with the kind of de­fen­sive record we went in­to the game with,” Reynolds told the Ja­maica Ob­serv­er.

“We knew the tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence and the speed of play that the Hait­ian team pos­sessed, and we just didn’t counter that well enough.

“I thought we con­ced­ed at some crit­i­cal stages of the game and they pushed us every time we got in the game,” he added.

Reynolds re­vealed the young Reg­gae Boyz were al­so ham­pered by the loss of their in­spi­ra­tional cap­tain Math­ieu Miller to in­jury.

“We lost fur­ther con­trol when we lost Math­ieu, our mid­field­er, [who] was keep­ing things to­geth­er for us. For the most part we tried to stick to a cou­ple of things we prac­tised and dis­cussed, and that to me was very pos­i­tive,” he said.

CMC