Description
The crowd erupted, Theodore Whitmore sprinted across the field carrying a Jamaican flag, players ran behind him in celebration. We had done it. The ‘Road to France’ was a reality…. It had been truly a journey, with curves, mountains, and bumps along the way….
This exerpt from The Impossible Dream captures the essence of this beautiful little book that describes how Jamaica made history as the first English-speaking Caribbean nation to qualify for a World Cup in 1998.
Told in his unique style of Brazilian-Jamaican English, René Simões, technical director of Jamaica’s Reggae Boyz, recounts how over a four-year period, with the help of corporate Jamaica and the support of key individuals, he was able to mould a rag-tag team of individualistic, talented footballers into a world-class aggregation to challenge for a place as one of the sixteen ‘best’ teams in the world. Full of amusing and sometimes hilarious anecdotes, Simões provides intimate and revealing pen portraits of the principal ‘dreamer’ Captain Horace Burrell, mercurial players like Walter Boyd, on the one hand, and inspirational figures like Tappa Whitmore, Bibi Gardner, and Peter Cargill on the other, as well as the pivotal role played by the Jamaican-English recruits. This is the story of the birth of Jamaican football and its first heroes both on and off the field. But more than a nostalgic look back at a moment in Jamaica’s sporting history, ‘it is a lesson in what can be accomplished if you are resilient enough to go after your dreams,’ says Simões. It is the story of those who believed, who dared to dream and became champions of the impossible.
