'SHAME' Published: Wednesday | September 7, 2011 6 Comments Cup qualification Gordon Williams, Gleaner Writer
Key members of Jamaica's senior national football team, which qualified for the 1998 World Cup, are frustrated and disappointed because they have not received land promised to them by the government 14 years ago as reward for the country's historic achievement.
According to national coach Theodore Whitmore, who was among the stars of the Reggae Boyz, and scored two goals against Japan at the World Cup in France, the players - including him, Warren Barrett, Hector Wright, Paul 'Tegat' Davis and the family of the late Stephen 'Shorty' Malcolm, "feel let down" because Jamaica has failed to deliver plots of government land owed to them.
"It's very, very disappointing," Whitmore said yesterday from the Jamaica team hotel here, hours before the Boyz tackled Colombia in an international friendly in nearby Fort Lauderdale, "and it's a shame".
Based on preliminary, but unconfirmed checks yesterday, it appears the five players, who were all based in Montego Bay during Jamaica's 'Road To France' campaign, are possibly the only ones yet to receive land. Even the driver of the Boyz' team bus has reportedly received his plot, but nothing so far for those from the west.
It's a danm crying shame, but why all of a sudden outta nowhere this a surface now anyway...? people vex over the recent losses and start to expose things now. I bet there's more to be reveal..
