Arnett Gardens coach Xavier Gilbert says the experience gained from their participation in the Concacaf Caribbean Shield was good preparation for the Concacaf Caribbean Championship (CCC) which starts later this month. Arnett captured the Concacaf Caribbean Shield following a 1-0 win over Grenades of Antigua and Barbuda in the final played in Curacao on Sunday. The 'Junglists' have been placed in Group A of the CCC alongside local clubs Mount Pleasant and Cavalier, as well as Real Hope of Haiti and Police of Trinidad and Tobago.
Gilbert believes that this unusual situation of three domestic clubs in the same group of an international competition will make things much more difficult but he says they are up for the task. "This tournament has prepared us nicely for the CCC. There are some things that we have to address and we have to fix them," he said.
"But there are two teams (Mount Pleasant and Cavalier) that we are familiar with and that will make things a bit tougher but we will prepare accordingly. There is a short time span for that and we will have to see how best we can recover." Gilbert said playing four matches in nine days was a gruelling task and that they had to manage their games sensibly to emerge as champions.
"It was tough playing on the artificial turf and with all the heat. So we had to manage things as best as we could. Although we were better than most of the teams we still had to navigate our way through to come out on top," he added.
Rushane Thompson netted the all-important goal in Sunday's decider, for his third goal in four games, and although it was not the team's best performance, Gilbert thought they handled themselves well enough. "We were better than them but they were very smart. They played very organised and stayed behind the ball and tried to counter when they could.
"We were a little impatient. We could have made some better decisions but we did create a few openings that we could have done better with. "But Thompson came up trumps again.
I must commend him (Thompson) and it was a beautiful goal that he scored as well," he said. Gilbert added also that the tournament was great experience and exposure for the players. "It was a fantastic.
We really garnered a lot of experience playing at international level. It was the first for some of these players. So it was a good platform for them to expose their talent and there were a lot of scouts watching.
We took a squad of 20 players and all of them played," the Arnett coach said. livingston.scott@gleanerjm.
com.
