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Trinidad and Tobago National football captain Dwight Yorke, in an interview with BBC Radio 1Xtra has paid tribute to FIFA Vice President Jack Warner for his longstanding commitment to the country’s efforts to reach the pinnacle of world football.


Yorke, who along with his other teammates met with Warner at the Renaissance Hotel on Tuesday, explained that he held no qualms over Warner despite all the recent allegations being thrown in his direction.

“He’s just an excited man and rightly so,”Yorke said. “He’s put so much into our football over the years. He’s tried over so many years in trying to qualify for the World Cup. We came close in 1990 by missing out by one point and here 17 years down the line he’s still at the front of our Federation and Vice President of FIFA and now that we are going I can understand why he’s s excited about the whole thing,” the double goalscorer over Iceland added  after being asked to comment on Warner’s high emotions on T&T’s qualifications and his comments at a press conference on Monday about England being in for a possible shock on June 20.

The former Manchester United forward has been the target of the Media here and was in some more warm company on Wednesday morning as close friend Brian Lara flew up to London to join Russell Latapy and the rest of the T&T contingent at the Renaissance Hotel in Heathrow. Lara stopped by to spend some luxury time with his close pals and to extend congrats messages to the team at the same time.

“It’s been a pleasing result for us,” Yorke told TTFF Media. “It shows clearly that we can match up with the good teams and it still shows also that I can match up with the other international teams. It definitely gives us a good indication of where we are at this stage now and hopefully we can continue to get better and work harder as we get close to the World Cup,” Yorke said.

“Credit must go out to the entire team and the management staff because we know it was not going to be easy to get our act together for this game after such a long time apart since the Bahrain game but we fought that off and we were able to give an encouraging performance today and I was just simply happy to make that kind of contribution with the two goals,” added the Sydney FC skipper. “We were delighted and we feel proud to have gotten such a great reception from the fans at the Stadium and we hope this can only get better as we go into the World Cup.

Latapy, who along with the other overseas pros, were scheduled to return to their respective clubs by Thursday, also felt the “Soca Warriors” gave a compelling performance.

”Obviously it was an important win for us because we went into this match having not played since November and the coach was using the opportunity to look at a few other players and wanted to get the best out of the team. But at the same time he didn’t mind the mistakes and I thought tonight there were few of them. This is a good sign for us ahead of the World Cup and hopefully we can keep it up and move on from here,” Latapy said.

Meantime, on Wednesday, Leo Beenhakker set off for Dublin to view the Sweden versus Republic of Ireland game while the other assistants – Anton Corneal and Wim Rijsbergen and scouts were also scheduled to be at the England/Uruguay and Paraguay/Wales encounter.

The home-based team contingent will head back to Port of Spain on Thursday with the exception of Beenhakker, manager Bruce Aanensen, Media Officer Shaun Fuentes, team doctor Terrence Babwah and security officer John Sandy who head off to Germany to attend a FIFA-organized workshop for the team staff members of every qualified 2006 World Cup team.

The full team will next reassemble in Port of Spain on May 7 for the friendly international against Peru on May 10 to be followed by a nationwide road show among other events.