After the German joy
By: Keith Smith (Express)
Friday, July 13th 2007
The world's most powerful football "adviser'', Jack Warner, was unusually circumspect with his words when he used the triumphant gathering of the Under-17s to mount, or more accurately, to begin to mount his counter-attack to that launched by some of the former "Soca Warriors" who attacked him for not anteing-up with all the monies promised them on their historic road-to-Germany campaign.
According to Mr Warner the "Warriors" have no signed paper to bring before any court to prove their point that they had been promised X-plus but, in fact, have received X-minus. It was not that they had not been promised X-plus but the promise had been made, verbally, in the heat of the euphoria in the wake of Trinidad and Tobago's unexpected, though courageous, draw with the far more highly rated Sweden.
Mr Warner - and this is to his credit - added that he was not even bound to admit that he had promised the players 50 per cent of whatever the revenue accrued since no pen had been put to paper on the matter but was doing so anyway to burnish his contention that on the happy night in question he had been carried away by his usual generosity.
Mr Warner, as his friends will line up to testify, is, indeed a generous man. Impulsive, too, and I can just see him on that celebratory occasion caught up, like every true Trinbagonian at the time in the mood and the spirit of the time, making an offer that the "Warriors" certainly would not have refused but which in the clarity of the following morning or weeks, for that matter, he realised he could meet - X yes, but not X-plus.
What neither Mr Warner nor the "Warriors" chieftains have clarified is whether the threatened court contestation is based on the powerful football adviser's heat-of-the-moment promise or on something more substantial, not necessarily written, but arrived at around a table in rather more tempered conditions. If the former, then, I am at a loss to understand why the "Warriors'' have not been able to come to terms with the post-Sweden promise for what it was and why we now have a situation where, in the view of some disaffected Soca Warriors, Mr Warner is a not-to-be-trusted scumbag and in the view of Mr Warner they are just some greedy old has-beens.
He, for his part, has promised to walk with figures that will really blow the whistle on the players but I don't know that that will be the end of the game since it is in the nature of the local football business not to have complete trust, to put it mildly, in the football sums of local or even FIFA officials, X-plus and X-plus too often, such is the critical, even cynical view, being presented not as 2X-plus but as X-minus, leaving those supposedly owed (as well as their mammies and tanties) angry with the algebra.
I suppose what it will all boil down to is whether the "Warriors" did in fact get a fair T&TFF/ FIFA take from their German journey (the million dollars per man they received from a grateful government cannot be made to count since that was taxpayers' money, given on behalf of all of us) all things considered, consideration having to be given both to the fact that they are professionals who did us proud and the need to plow back some of that money into the game's development, no player as both Yorke and Latapy have shown us, able to go on forever at the highest level, not that the Tobagonian titan and the Laventille lord are not having a good, well, shot at it.
Patriotic sentimentalist that I am, I am still hoping that the post-Germany fall out can still end amicably not least because of the sourness that often seems to sustain sport interactions here, the ongoing football fracas having already led to not only what appears to be an unremitting clash of wills, but to a pitiably poor performance in the Gold Cup as well as a withdrawal of both empathy and sympathy from well-wishers both here and abroad, German joy giving way to a grinding of teeth.
And so, with what I hope (ha!) has been a seamless switch from cricket ("Converted by captaincy'', July 12) to football for the week, I rest.
