Costa Rica test for Soca Warriors.
By: Ian Prescott (Express).
Trinidad and Tobago's Soca Warriors face their first CONCACAF test since playing in the FIFA World Cup last June when they travel to Central America for a meeting with the Costa Rican senior men's national football team in the mountainous Alajuela district, on February 4.
The Soca Warriors have a losing record against Los Ticos and have not defeated Costa Rica in seven years. At the 2000 CONCACAF Gold Cup, deceased striker Mickey Trotman gave T&T a sudden-death 2-1 victory.
During the 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign, the teams drew 0-0 in Port of Spain, before Costa Rica won the return-leg 2-0 at the Rommel Fernandez Stadium in the capital, San Jose, to qualify automatically for the World Cup as the third-placed team in the CONCACAF region, behind the United States and Mexico. Trinidad and Tobago, fourth in CONCACAF qualifying, also reached the World Cup after beating Asia's Bahrain 2-1 on aggregate in a home-and-away playoff. In Germany, at the World Cup, Trinidad and Tobago got a point when holding Sweden goalless, while Costa Rica lost all three of their preliminary matches, going down 4-2 to Germany, 3-0 to Ecuador and 2-1 to Poland.
T&T coach Wim Rijsbergen is using the Costa Rica match as a gauge of the preparation needed to ready Trinidad and Tobago for the CONCACAF Gold Cup, to be played in the United States in mid-year, and to intensify the preparation of his national footballers. Once again, Rijsbergen will be without his England and Scotland-based professionals, including World Cup captain Dwight Yorke. But he is expected to have experienced Jabloteh players Aurtis Whitley and Cyd Gray and W Connection players Andrei Pacheco and Andre Toussaint in his side.
"We play Costa Rica," Rijsbergen confirmed. "We will play with the locally-based players and some of the United States boys."
The coach hinted that some of the players on the current Digicel Caribbean Cup team might not make it to Costa Rica. Already, the Digicel Caribbean Cup has revealed the limitations of some players, and the coach says he is willing to give a few more players an opportunity to prove they can make it on the higher international stage.
"We will be without the overseas-based players because the match will not be played on a FIFA date. We are playing the match because we want to continue to expose the boys to a higher level of international football and see who has the capability of playing a higher level of international football," Rijsbergen said.
The match itself should be quite a stern test since Trinidad and Tobago will, for the first time, be playing Costa Rica in the mountainous inland Alajuela region, an area marked by lush natural beauty and spectacular volcanoes. Alajuela is about 11 miles northwest of San Jose.
Like the Soca Warriors, the Costa Ricans are trying to build a new team, under former star Hernan Medford, who replaced Brazilian Alexandre Guimaraes, who quit following a disappointing World Cup. Medford was a member of Costa Rica's 1990 World Cup squad and coached them at the 2002 finals in Japan and South Korea.
Another Costa Rica standout, Paulo Wanchope, retired after the World Cup. The 29-year-old former Derby County, West Ham and Manchester City ace netted an impressive 45 goals in 72 games for Los Ticos. He has opted out of international football to concentrate on his club career. However, because most Costa Rica players play football within their own country, they are still expected to field an almost full-strength squad against the Soca Warriors.
