Golden opportunity
By: Fazeer Mohammed (Express)
Wednesday, May 30th 2007
Forget about all this talk of revenge and dress-rehearsal.
As admirable as the effort of the national team was on Monday night in defeating Haiti, the 1-0 result does not avenge the loss to the same side four months earlier in the final of the Caribbean Cup. In this case, one result cannot make amends for the other, much like a victory by Sri Lanka in their next One-Day International against Australia could never compensate for being well beaten in last month's Cricket World Cup final in Barbados, unless it happens to be the final of the 2011 World Cup.
It makes for eye-catching headlines to talk of settling scores, but in reality, no-one with an appreciation of the comparative significance of the established premier football tournament in the region against a one-off exhibition tournament featuring a couple of significantly-weakened teams will accept that Andre Toussaint's goal has erased the disappointment of the Haitians' 2-1 triumph at the same Hasely Crawford Stadium last January.
At an even greater level, the injustice meted out to an outstanding Trinidad and Tobago team against the Haitians in Port-au-Prince in the final stage of World Cup qualifying almost 33 years ago remains an open wound that will probably never fully heal, even after the experience of getting to the finals at last in Germany.
By the same token, this evening's deciding game of the Digicel Shield is no real precursor to next month's Gold Cup, simply because the Mexicans have sent a youth team to this brief competition. Should all of their top players be available, they will be significantly stronger for the tournament in the United States, so it is probably just as well that Densill Theobald's side is not drawn in the same preliminary group as the squad now coached by their former striking star Hugo Sanchez.
Much in the manner in which many Trinis are showing only a passing interest in the West Indies tour of England, primarily due to the surprise retirement of Brian Lara, there seems to be a considerably lower level of expectation of how the national footballers will fare in the Gold Cup in the absence of almost all the players who featured in the historic World Cup experience.
Yet it should be remembered that even when the very strongest squads have been available, the best that T&T have ever managed in CONCACAF's showpiece event is as beaten semi-finalists in 2000, when we went under to eventual champions Canada after seeming to have done all the hard work in eliminating Costa Rica at the quarter-final stage via a sudden-death goal from the late Mickey Trotman.
This is not a sideways attempt to somehow justify the Football Federation's childish blacklisting of the country's top players. In fact, it is to the eternal shame of everyone who claims to love the game of football that the sport here continues to be blighted by one controversy or another year after year. But, then again, the same can be said of so many other institutions in sweet T&T, sporting or otherwise, so I suppose football is merely reflecting the haphazard manner in which we generally function.
However, none of this is the fault of the young men who now wear the national colours at senior level, and it was heartening that they should put forward such a committed effort against Haiti. That the only goal of the game was laid on for the substitute Toussaint by Theobald after a real scrap by the captain for ball possession probably reflects most accurately the state of the current national team: lots of ability, but needing to work extremely hard to make up for the lack of experience and international exposure.
Even then, that work-rate is unlikely to be enough at the higher level of Gold Cup competition. Yet they can only play the opponents in front of them and not linger over the very real prospect that most will be cast aside once everything is sorted between the senior professionals and the administration, as it most surely will in time for next year's kick-off of the qualifying campaign for the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa.
The game on Monday night, this evening's duel with the young Mexicans and the Gold Cup itself are all opportunities for a lightly-regarded national team to confound their own coach. Wim Rijsbergen has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the standard of play in the T&T Pro League, so what better way to make the Dutchman think again than for the players to pull out all the stops and play as if their very international careers depend on how they perform in the next few games? In many ways, they do.
Whatever the result in the Digicel Shield finale, there should be no illusions as to the enormity of the challenge facing Trinidad and Tobago in the Gold Cup. In eight days' time, they will be taking on El Salvador, then the hosts USA two days later, both in Los Angeles, before travelling across the country to tackle Guatemala on June 12 in their final group fixture in Boston.
Critics and fans may fear the worst. Indeed, some may be hoping for it as a way of pressing the case of the exiled pros. But it's up to Theobold and his teammates to make the most of this opportunity, and not look back on the experience with the regret of having failed to give their all for themselves and their country.
-fazeer2001@hotmail.com
