Junior Soca Warriors battle Reggae counterparts for World Cup berth.
By: Shaun Fuentes (TTFF).
Trinidad and Tobago’s National Under 17 footballers will attempt to become only the fourth team from the Caribbean to qualify for a FIFA Under 17 World Championship when it takes on Jamaica in a final CONCACAF round encounter at the National Stadium, Kingston from 7pm (8pm T&T Time) on Sunday.
The junior “Soca Warriors” set themselves up with a firm chance of claiming the third spot out of their qualifying group for the World Championship in Korea in August with a 2-1 win over Canada on Friday. But Jamaica also kept its chances alive with a come from behind 3-2 win over the United States, scoring three goals in the closing ten minutes of the match.
T&T has played at a World Under 17 Championship before but has never qualified for one. The only Caribbean teams to qualify include Haiti, for the upcoming finals, Jamaica in 1999 and Cuba in 1988 and 1991. For the past two FIFA U17 World Championships, Costa Rica, USA and Mexico represented the CONCACAF on both successive occasions in 2003 and 2005.
Both teams will be a vying for a spot among twenty-four nations at the World Championship. Already Japan, hosts Korea, Korea DPR, Tajikistan, Syria, Nigeria,Togo, Ghana and Syria, Haiti and Honduras, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Argentina and New Zealand have qualified. The UEFA final round kicked off on May 2 with five teams to come from that region.
The last time T&T met Jamaica in a youth encounter was at the 2006 Caribbean Youth Cup third place playoff at the Hasely Crawford Stadium when T&T came away 2-0 winners. Stephen Knox, the scorer of T&T’s second goal on Friday, struck back then in the 44th minute and current team captain Ryan O’Neil got the other item in the 53rd minute. The entire T&T starting team in 2006 is also in the present squad and the Jamaicans have up to eight players in its current team that suffered that defeat including Orgill Dever, one of their goalscorers against the Americans on Friday and John Ross Doyley who struck the winner from the penalty spot in injury added on time.
The T&T team had a recovery session in the pool on Saturday morning and kept together for the remainder of the day looking ahead to the big affair. Already officials of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation including special advisor Jack Warner and President Oliver Camps have sent messages on to the team and parents who made the journey over along with other Trinidadians residing here have come out at the Stadium to support the team. It is expected that T&T students from the UWI here will also show up at the venue on Sunday as Jamaican friends here have indicated that the home team fans will come out in their numbers to back the “Reggae Boyz”.
Coach Corneal remained calm and expects the same of his players but he knows too that they must be prepared and up for the challenge.
“It’s a situation now where even though we have it our hands, they (Jamaica) also have it to play for so it will be a different game but that will not cause us to change our impressions of the game. We knew all along that it could come down to the matches against Canada and Jamaica and that is exactly the situation we are in now. We got past Canada, it took a lot of fight from us but we stood up to the pressure and now must do the same against Jamaica. It’s a very big game for us and we must rise to the challenge now,” Corneal told TTFF Media.
Skipper O’Neil and his teammates have a chant they have used to fire themselves up in the tunnel before walking out for the earlier matches which goes “The more we sweat in peace time, the least we bleed in war! When side come to die… Kill Them! Who are we T&T!”
Surely come kick off time, the battle will be on between these two Caribbean rivals.