Veteran football coach and broadcaster Neville Bell has reflected on the extraordinary national unity he remembers surrounding Jamaica’s historic qualification for the 1998 FIFA World Cup.<\/p>\n
Speaking on the No NDA Podcast, Bell recalled the atmosphere in Jamaica during the qualification campaign and the impact football appeared to have across the country.<\/p>\n
Bell said Jamaica played 10 home matches during the campaign without losing and without conceding a goal.<\/p>\n
He further recalled that nine of those match days reportedly recorded no murders in Jamaica, while he said the country went three days without a murder around the match in which Jamaica secured qualification.<\/p>\n
Bell presented the recollection as an example of the wider social influence he believes sport, and football in particular, can have on Jamaican society.<\/p>\n
He also recalled travelling to France with Jamaica’s Under-20 setup during the year of the World Cup and seeing a Jamaica shirt displayed in a Paris sports store alongside shirts representing established football powers including Brazil and Argentina.<\/p>\n
Bell said the sight was deeply significant to him because it demonstrated how Jamaica’s qualification had elevated the country’s international football profile.<\/p>\n
He purchased the Jamaica shirt but said he later gave it to a Jamaican woman he encountered outside the store, recalling her emotional reaction to receiving it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Neville Bell recalled the extraordinary national atmosphere surrounding Jamaica’s historic World Cup qualification.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jamaica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}