As Somerset Trojans prepared to bow out of the Caribbean Club Championship in Haiti in late February, coach Kieshon Smith reopened a very stale can of worms. Not unimportant, mind, but stale all the same, for the lack of attention given to his concerns and those of many who came before him.

Same story, different venter.

Long in advance of Shaun Goater and Kyle Lightbourne forging highly successful professional football careers in England, there had been calls for a degree more professionalism to be introduced into our domestic game. Back then, the pool of seriously decent players was far deeper than it is at present, so the idea bore significantly more merit than it would now.

For those who can recall Mel Bean, younger brother of Ralph Bean but a terrific player in his own right, he was at the forefront of a drive in the late Seventies and early Eighties to unionise footballers so that they might have more rights.

Mel was a bit of a nonconformist coming up in the shadow of his more celebrated brother at North Village — some might say a rebel — but, as could be seen during his successful period as captain of the Bermuda Under-18 team, he showed leadership potential from early on.

But, for all his appeal and charisma, Mel could not muster enough support for his initiative for it to be taken on board, and it died a death. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was an opportunity lost because who knows where the sport might be now.

In between, the island has continued to produce players who were talented enough to make it at a higher level, as long as they had the inner drive and a support network that could see them through the inevitable difficult times.

Gone was the period when the likes of Randy Horton, Ralph Bean, Granville Nusum, Gary Darrell and Fred Lewis had professional or semi-professional contracts in the United States, but Bermuda nevertheless managed to turn out Wendell Baxter, Cyril Steede, Lorenzo Symonds, Andrew Bascome and Dennis Brown.

Each on his day was worth the price of admission, but each was destined to end as a domestically based player, which was most disappointing in the cases of the latter two because interest was being reignited genuinely before the end of their careers in having someone follow in the footsteps of Arnold Woollard and Clyde Best by playing top-flight football in England.

The lesson learnt by the end of the Eighties was that we had to get our best young players out of the country early if they were to have a chance to realise dreams of turning professional.

Short of their talent being prodigious, whereby a club would snap them up for their youth academies, a commitment to education while playing football would be essential.

If the football was destined not to be in their future as a full-time gig, the education would be in place — and no one could take that away.

That’s what Bascome, now the Bermuda coach, was getting at in his interview after the 2-1 win over French Guiana nine days ago at National Stadium. He put a thoroughly professional performance against a decent team — the result having gained in currency by Tuesday when the South American mainlanders thrashed Cuba 3-0 — down to the majority of his squad being either exposed to professional or semi-professional football, or abroad in school where the ability to take on instruction can make the difference between passing and failing.

Four years into his post after what seemed a lifetime waiting for the chance, Bascome finally got to oversee a Bermuda performance that was made to order — and it was accomplished without the island’s most fêted player, Nahki Wells, who stayed behind in West Yorkshire with Huddersfield Town in the second tier of English football.

Which brings us to Smith’s rant about the country paying lip service to its athletes.

It was a sweeping statement to take in all sports, although it is clear that he was really talking about football.

Given that Somerset still had one match to play in Haiti when he made his comments, this was almost a case of Smith getting his retaliation in first.

There is not a great deal of money in Bermuda football and the chances of the local FA throwing money it does not have at locally based players, those who do not give Bascome the best chance to win, are relatively slim.

But it is true that more can be done; a starting point of sorts. There has to be more in it for players than playing for just for the sake of it. Even if it is the clubs who receive the bounty at the end of the day, then so be it.

The most salient point made during Smith’s outburst was: “Clubs don’t just want a motorcade and a party at the end of the season when they win a trophy.

“The prize money for winning the Premier Division title should not be the same as a team getting relegated — nothing.”

With the country more than $2 billion in debt, you can forget about help from finance minister Bob Richards, and historically sport has got the very short end of the stick come budget day. But the Bermuda Football Association can make a start by redirecting on a proportionate basis a fraction of what it gets annually from Fifa towards the ten clubs that make up the Premier Division. There appears little justification to give Smith all he wants and to have domestic players paid.

The timing is not as ridiculously bad as when our former columnist, Clay Smith, suggested such for the cricketers on the back of a 12-month sequence when that sport was being dragged through the mud pillar to post by the very same would-be beneficiaries.

But just not right now. The suggestion has merit, and for cricket too, but it requires more than one man. It needs full buy-in, a fresh generation of committed players, and then a commitment to see it through that was not forthcoming when Mel Bean made his unrequited passion play all those years ago.