In probably the most watched game ever by Antiguan standards the USA topped us 3-1 in our first world cup, Concacaf group A qualifier. Firstly as a former goal keeper myself I’ll start on Molvin James our 5’8 starting keeper. Positively, he saved us from maybe taking a 5 or 6-1 loss with a few brilliant reflexive saves, it is important you emphasize ‘reflexive’ because honestly his ability as a keeper is almost all quick reflex. Molvin had no real command of his box; many of those parried shots weren’t even strong efforts and should’ve been held onto. Also why wouldn’t he change his studs, he slipped at least 6 times that I counted on the wet pitch. In the Antigua defence 3 out our 4 defenders IQ at marking a forward or midfielder was awful. Defending a player doesn’t mean constantly going to ground at his feet to tackle. Yes Donovan is a world class player, very quick and has lots of tricks but Antigua’s defensive players are not slow keeping a striker in front of you shouldn’t have been so difficult. Our defence was still relatively solid barring one factor, CLEARING! You have got to clear the ball from danger and take pressure off yourself better as a defender, heading the ball clear or kicking the ball far up the field was lacking in the defence and at least 2 goals were scored as a result of poor clearances. Midfield, this is where we are absolutely abysmal. Yes Antigua is small but out of our 86,000 we can’t find a midfielder who plays with his head? A midfielder who can hold up the ball and spot outlet passes to the wings or upfront to our forwards? Murtagh, Robinson and Leigterwood are clearly not it when it comes to passing in the midfield all that needs to be said is we had time since facing Haiti to resolve this problem of no midfield presence and nothing has been done. Besides the pass to Byers in which Byers did all the work himself to score.
I didn’t even notice Tamarley ‘Ziggy’ Thomas was even on the pitch. Randolph ‘Etty’ Burton on the other hand constantly looked overwhelmed by the moment, a bunch of nervous touches that resulted in miscontrolling the ball or over hit passes. Finally our forwards, Dexter Blackstock is not the answer for us upfront. I haven’t seen him much so I can only go on what I saw in this match, he’s not very fast, doesn’t really make great runs to move the defence, is not very strong physically on the ball and doesn’t have a strikers awareness. Peter Byers on the other hand is big, strong, fast and has the presence of a front man, also when he came on he singlehandedly raised the level of the entire team. All in all it was a proud day for Antigua and we were on ESPN so there’s that, but I feel like we could’ve won that game 1-0 because USA was sloppy and looked unfit and we gave away 3 soft goals.
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