Duckie dimisses Maxwell's RSPL claims

Humble Lion FC head coach Donovan Duckie says while he has respect for coach Geoffrey Maxwell, he does not take his recent comments that defenders and attackers in the Red Stripe Premier League are "poor" seriously.

Maxwell, the coach of Kingston and St Andrew Football Association Club, New Kingston, in a recent Gleaner article attributed the poor quality of players to clubs spending too much time scouting the local schoolboy football leagues.

my opinion

"Half of them [teams] are bringing in a lot of schoolboy players. Premier League and dacosta Cup and Manning Cup are three different things. Sometimes you can take a fool and programme him and make him go out there and win in the Premier League because I think the Premier League defenders are poor, but that's just my opinion. I think the attacking players in the Premier League nowadays are also poor," Maxwell said.

While a number of coaches and administrators at RSPL clubs refused to comment, Duckie was bold as he dismissed Maxwell's comments.

"Jamaican players are the envy of overseas coaches," Duckie told STAR Sports.

"Jamaica has produced Usain Bolt and we have footballers who can produce a similar level of athleticism," he added.

Maxwell also said in the article that coaches allow young players to develop large egos, which make them difficult to coach but Duckie also disagrees with this.

top player

"Nothing wrong young players having egos. You have bad egos and you have good egos. Nothing is wrong with a player aspiring to be a top player," Duckie says.

One thing that he did find common ground on with Maxwell, however, is that youth development in Jamaica needs improvement because too many local coaches are allowed to train teams without proper certification.

"We also say the players in the Premier League are young when they are between 21 and 24 years old. They're not. In the English Premier League, you have clubs like Arsenal who have players in the league at a younger age than that. The problem is not the players. The problem is the coaches in charge of them."