Speid unperturbed as Cavalier rebuild

Cavalier coach Rudolph Speid will be rebuilding for the second consecutive Jamaica Premier League (JPL) season with several players from last year leaving.

According to Speid, Kenroy Campbell and Christopher Pearson have moved on to professional contracts, Melvin Doxilly and Bryan English have joined local clubs, while Lamont Rochester has taken up a scholarship to a United States of America (USA) college.

In the meantime, Nichashe Murray, Shaniel Thomas, Kimanni Gibbon, Marlando Maxwell, St Lucian Vino Bartlett and Antiguan Jalmaro Calvin for various reasons, have not returned to pre-season training.

Speid expects Cavalier to grow and get better as the season progresses and eventually challenge for the title, despite admitting that losing the experience these players provide will affect them in the short term.

"There will be an effect definitely. None of these players is rookie. These are players that know what the league is all about. So it will affect us immensely, but it is not the first that we are losing this amount of players. We lost many players in 2021 and came back and won the league.

"The first part of the league, when the schoolboy season is being played, is going to affect us. I will not be able to replace some of those players with the quality that I need because when you do not have experience you need quality," he pointed out.

The JPL, however, will go on break in November during the FIFA World Cup tournament from November 20-December 18 and Speid said the intermission will be a blessing for Cavalier.

"The good thing is that the league will stop after five rounds for a month because of the World Cup and that will help my cause a lot. By the time the playoffs come around the players will have gathered experience and will know what the league has to offer," he said.

Although they are in a rebuilding phase, he believes they still have good experience players in Dwayne Atkinson, Ronaldo Webster, Omar Laing, Jaedine White and Christopher Ainsworth. He also believes the talent they have brought in will make a good complement.

"We brought in (schoolboys) Matthew Ellis, Lewis Watson and Ronaldo Barrett from Mount Pleasant Academy and Earon Elliot from Portmore.

"We now have to settle them again because these weren't the players that were playing consistently last year, so the team building process is what we are now working on and I am confident that we will improve over the season as we have always done," he said.

Speid expects a fifth straight semi-final appearance this season, despite the 2021 champions' shortcomings.

"We expect that before halfway the season, we will be back up to full strength. For the last four years, we have come no less than third, even while rebuilding.

"It is just for us to get it to click although we do not know when that will be. We just need to peak at the play-off time. That is when it is important and usually we come up trumps in the playoffs," he said.