Mission Impossible.. Soca Warriors rewrite history.
By: Lasana Liburd.[/size]
Lasana Liburd looks at T&T's historic 2006 qualifying effort and a prolific but controversial striker who helped make it possible.
“Trinidad and Tobago?” asked the Bahraini fan, who looked as if he had ingested something bitter. “Bahrain will win easy. Maybe 3-0.
“Your players like Dwight Yorke; they are too old.”
Bahrain, a desert island off Saudia Arabia with just 800,000 citizens, was certain that its destiny lay in Germany. In its capital of Manama, their cheeky optimism was limitless.
“Yorke has good experience,” retorted a Trinidad and Tobago fan.
“Hah!” the Bahraini retorted. “My mother has good experience but you won’t see her on the field.”
A long arduous journey, in more ways than one, would end for the Trinidad and Tobago football team on November 16 halfway across the globe in a FIFA Play Off match for a 2006 World Cup place.
Bahrain needed a goalless draw at home after a 1-1 tie in the first leg at Port of Spain. It seemed a result that was well within the capabilities of the Arab nation who was untroubled for much of the game at the Hasely Crawford Stadium. Only a tremendous volley from Trinidad and Tobago midfielder Chris Birchall denied them all three points.
And yet there was an air of serenity around the visiting squad.
“Fellahs, the pressure is on them now,” Stern John told his teammates before the decisive match. “If we play anything close to how we did against Mexico, we will beat this team.”
In the weeks before T&T’s crucial fixture in Bahrain on November 16, 2005, the media focused on the Caribbean’s marquee trio of Dwight Yorke, Russell Latapy and Shaka Hislop and their efforts to inspire a tiny nation to the world’s biggest football tournament. The trio’s roles as elder statesmen cannot be understated but neither could the importance of the man nicknamed “Bravo”.
Within the national team camp, it is taken for granted that, if T&T is to score, John must be in the mood.
“(John) is always there at the right moments,” said national coach Leo Beenhakker. “He is very, very dangerous for us.”
John, 29, loves the responsibility.
Tutored from an early age by former national players Arthur “Jap” Brown and Alvin Corneal, John’s technique and eye for goal made him a standout at youth level when he represented El Dorado Senior and he was just 19 when he made his senior international debut in 1996—an era when T&T possessed a glut of attacking players like Dwight Yorke, Leonson Lewis, Jerren Nixon, Angus Eve, Clint Marcelle and Arnold Dwarika.
On his introduction, John sat as close as he dared to Yorke and team captain Russell Latapy in the dressing room and almost tripped the pair on the training ground in his enthusiastic effort to rub shoulders.
“Who is this boy?” an amused Yorke asked Latapy at one session.
“I am Stern John,” said the fresh-faced upstart.
In Trinidad and Tobago’s first home fixture of the 1998 campaign, John got his first competitive start and opened the scoring with a first minute goal. He ended with a hattrick and, although he did not score again in the series, no one in red, black and white strip matched his tally.
He continued to score at a fierce rate for club and country. Two years later, John topped all scorers in the United States’ Major League Soccer (MLS) with Columbus Crew.
In 1999, he joined English First Division team Nottingham Forest and Yorke, fresh from a treble of titles with Premiership giants Manchester United, declared that John had the tools to surpass him.
A move to Birmingham City in 2002 saw John join his hero, Yorke, in the Premiership and by the start of the 2006 World Cup qualifiers, John had replaced Yorke as the team’s attacking star. The latter player retired, along with Latapy, following a row with ex-coach Rene Simoes in 2001.
In the 2002 campaign, Trinidad and Tobago showed early verve with a run of four successive semi-final round victories, which included a 2-0 triumph away to Canada and a surprise 1-0 win at home to Mexico. But the ill-timed departure of Yorke and Latapy deprived a tiny football nation of its best players and struck a note of discord between the national squad and its supporters.
As the 2006 edition kicked off, John felt the weight of an increasingly cynical T&T public more than any other player. A shock transfer from Birmingham further alienated the gifted goalscorer.
The national players were watching sports news on television when a news flash indicated that Birmingham City had just signed Yorke and the club boss Steve Bruce hinted that John would be the player to give way.
There was an awkward silence as John met his teammates the next morning and the mood was not helped by a 3-1 defeat to “El Tricolor” in the preceding qualifier on October 4. Midway though the game, John seemed to lose control.
“Are you kidding me?” John screamed at his teammates. “It’s just 1-0! You have no heart! You are damned disgrace!”
Coach Bertille St Clair, a renowned disciplinarian, was in charge from the start of the 2006 campaign and managed to coax Yorke and Hislop out of retirement. But he struggled to unite a dressing room divided by varying ambitions and egos as well to woo supporters desperate for silky play.
John was battling his own demons. Whether correctly or not, he was seeing enemies everywhere while pockets of Trinidad and Tobago patrons now openly jeered him.
“If I was you, I would just quit,” one senior player told John, on the eve of a qualifier away to Guatemala on March 26, 2005.
“I am so disappointed in you,” John retorted. “How could you tell me that?”
On the following day, Trinidad and Tobago was 3-1 down by halftime and teammates had to respond quickly to keep two players from settling a heated argument with fists. The Warriors eventually lost 5-1 and, it seemed, another World Cup dream had come to an inglorious end.
Five days later, on April 1, St Clair was fired but even that was done in a shabby, unconvincing manner. The coach heard the news on the radio while driving to a meeting with his Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (T&TFF) employers while FIFA vice-president and T&TFF special advisor, Jack Warner, faced a mutiny when he announced St Clair’s successor.
There was a moment of stunned silence as the country’s British-based players looked at each other for confirmation about what they heard. Warner had appointed Ron Atkinson. It is uncertain whether Warner was ignorant of the fact that Atkinson, or “Big Ron”, had recently been sacked from a lucrative job as a television commentator after racially abusing French World Cup winner Marcel Desailly.
“If Ron comes, I am gone!” said Yorke, who played for Atkinson at Aston Villa.
Hislop and John supported Yorke’s stance and Warner backed down. Hours later, the veteran administrator emerged with a second name, Leo Beenhakker.
The Dutchman’s resume included spells with top European teams like Ajax and Real Madrid while he led Holland at the 1990 World Cup finals and even coached in Mexico. Beenhakker immediately began instilling belief in his troop.
“Every time this team plays, it beats itself,” Beenhakker told the squad. “You give away silly goals, you do not track your runners, you are indisciplined… You beat yourselves.”
The national team had just one point from three qualifying matches thus far but the players were to desperate to believe that the World Cup remained a possibility. The next day, the intensity of the national team’s sessions went up another a notch.
A 2-0 win at home to Panama in the elderly coach’s first international fixture helped further lift sagging morale. Nineteen minutes from time, Beenhakker replaced John, who scored the opening goal, with Kenwyne Jones. Still hurting from the crowd’s lukewarm response to him, John confronted the coach in the dressing room.
“Why did you take me off?” asked John. “I was having a good game. What more could I have done?”
Beenhakker did not bat an eyelid.
“I like your attitude,” he said, in an even tone. “I do not want players who are happy to come off the field.”
Word spread through the camp that Beenhakker’s obsession laid in winning matches not with reputations. By September, Latapy felt suitably encouraged by news of the national setup to accept a plea by Yorke to rejoin the squad for the crucial return fixture against Guatemala.
Latapy grabbed the first goal for the hosts while a late double from John clinched a dramatic 3-2 win. John celebrated his first item with a foul scream at his own fans who again booed his every touch.
“Imagine all my life, I leaving my team in England and traveling all this way to represent my country,” said John, “and people booing me off the pitch. Everyone in the media too talking about give this one and that one a chance ahead of me. I will never forget that and I will never apologise for what I’ve done.”
By now, John was indispensable and it was his goal that clinched a 1-0 win over Panama on October 8. He produced a memorable encore at home to a weakened Mexican outfit, four days later, with both goals in a 2-1 win that clinched a Play Off berth against Bahrain. Once more, John showed his character by rebounding from a missed penalty kick early in the match.
His second goal was a cracking strike into the top corner with his left foot—he dedicated his goals off his weaker foot to late teammate Mickey Trotman whose tattoo he sports on his left calf—although he preferred his opening strike when he successfully followed up an Aurtis Whitley shot that rebounded off the upright.
“The ball flew off the post with so much pace,” said John, “that I had to let it hit me at an angle to score. If I tried to hit the ball, it would have gone overbar.”
Trinidad and Tobago felt confident of its ability to get past Bahrain. In November, 1989, the country prematurely celebrated its expected ascension to the 1990 World Cup. Sixteen years later, the team again struggled to maintain focus as dozens of family, friends and well wishers surrounded the players on a daily basis at its Crowne Plaza base.
On match day, a jaded Trinidad and Tobago team could only manage a 1-1 tie thanks to Birchall—a white Englishman who was eligible to represent the Warriors because of a Trinidadian mother.
Away to Bahrain, the real Trinidad and Tobago team showed up.
Four minutes into the second half, six foot seven defender Dennis Lawrence scored the most important goal of his career with a firm downward header from a Yorke corner. And, in stoppage time, Jack preserved the lead with a sensational save as the stadium seemed to ignite with frustration from the host nation.
The players cried, sang and danced the night away in Manama. After 40 years of toiling, Trinidad and Tobago had proven itself worthy of playing alongside the world’s elite football nations.
