St Vincent and the Grenadines became the first casualty of the 2019 Rugby World Cup qualifying campaign last weekend when they crashed to a 48-0 defeat to Jamaica in Kingstown.

A try and an inspirational performance from captain and fly-half Hubert Thomas, coupled with a dominant forward effort, set the scene for Jamaica's win, which gave them an outside chance of qualifing for Japan by booking their place in the eight-team 2016 Rugby Americas North Championship.

“It’s great, it’s wonderful,” said fly-half Thomas. “Our scrum was amazing today and that made it easy for us to use our pace in the backs to hit the gaps and press that advantage. It’s the best scrum I’ve seen in Jamaica and I’ve been playing in the team for 16 years.

“We’ll go back to Jamaica now and continue training and working hard because we have a lot of work to do in order to get past the next phase. We’re working towards Japan. We will go as far as we can in this process and the guys will believe in themselves that we can do this.”

Next up Jamaica take on Trinidad and Tobago in a fortnight in the first of three games they will play in the South Zone of the championship, which also features Barbados and Guyana.

The winner of that series of round-robin matches will play the top team from the North Zone, comprised of Mexico, Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, on 23 July for the right to continue in the qualification process and be in with a chance of facing the loser of the two-game series between the United States and Canada for a place in the finals.

But to reach that stage the Caribbean qualifier would have to negotiate their way through a series of games against the top teams from the South American Rugby Championship.

With 12 teams having secured their place at Japan 2019 courtesy of finishing in the top three of their respective pools in 2015, the remaining eight places will be determined by a process of regional and cross-regional qualifiers and, for the first time, a stand-alone round-robin repechage tournament to determine the final qualifier in 2018.

In all, the qualifying stages for Japan comprises around 200 matches, featuring in excess of 3,000 players across six continents, including the developing rugby markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as the USA and Mexico.

2016 Rugby Americas North Championship
March 23: Trinidad v Jamaica
April 23: Guyana v Barbados
May 7: Bahamas v Mexico
May 21: Guyana v Jamaica, Barbados v Trinidad, Cayman Islands v Bahamas, Mexico v Bermuda
May 28: Jamaica v Barbados
June 4: Bermuda v Bahamas
June 18: Trinidad v Guyana, Cayman Islands v Bermuda
July 2: Mexico v Cayman Islands
July 23: North Zone Winner v South Zone Winner