Warrior franchise needs urgent repair.[/size]
Lasana Liburd ponders how to arrest the decline of Trinidad and Tobago's most successful football team
If you can meet with triumph and disaster, And treat those two imposters just the same (Excerpt from Rudyard Kipling). A good house does not collapse overnight. The same can be said of a solid sporting team” one with the required combination of talent, work ethic and camaraderie. And the "Soca Warriors" were every inch a firm outfit.
Unyielding enough to frustrate more gifted squads like England and Sweden, talented enough to see off Panama (away), Guatemala and Mexico in decisive fixtures and to scare the aforementioned European sides and united enough to hold their own post mortems and govern themselves at critical junctures.
Just two years ago, Trinidad and Tobago lined up amongst the best football nations and made them take notice with courageous performances at the Germany 2006 World Cup. That was when the slide begun and English poet and Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling's prophetic warning about the seduction of success came to pass. In the aftermath of Trinidad and Tobago's historic goalless draw against Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (T&TFF) special advisor and FIFA vice-president Jack Warner visited the players and promised half of all income accrued from the team's participation in the showcase tournament.
It was, we found out, a promise Warner never intended to keep. The Warriors, already immortalized in their homeland, now dreamt of riches too for their efforts. Only Warner felt that he and not the players was the real engineer of the country's success. There were plenty in the media and otherwise who agreed. Oliver Camps and Richard Groden, the T&TFF president and general secretary respectively, oversaw the most famous team in the nation's history so surely they too had reason to be proud. There was never going to be enough headroom to accommodate so many swollen egos.
The cracks began in that joyous June of 2006. It was the irony of the gods, though, that they would become so obvious in 2008”on the centennial year of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association. Surely no World Cup team ever started their next campaign with defeat to such paltry opposition. Bermuda, who are ranked 139th in the world, have not defeated Trinidad and Tobago since the advent of the internet but their 2-1 win in Macoya on Sunday was not the first sign of trouble.
After an embarrassing 3-0 defeat to England in the much vaunted Centennial match, one British journalist wrote that their coach Fabio Capello never had an easier game and that included his spell at Juventus when the Italian club president routinely paid off referees. The difference between the Warriors of 2008 and 2006 was glaringly evident.
But the seeds of discontent were already sown. Coaches Francisco Maturana and Anton Corneal bemused observers by snatching students from recess to represent the senior team ahead of blooded professionals like Chris Birchall, Kerry Baptiste and Scott Sealy. Then head coach Wim Rijsbergen and technical director Lincoln "Tiger" Phillips had a physical altercation in front their respective work colleagues. Warner advised the T&TFF to ignore the players' union, the Football Players Association of Trinidad and Tobago (FPATT), while the local football body took on and lost to their players in a London courtroom.
And what about Warner's accusation of racial discrimination at Sport Minister Gary Hunt, less than three months in the latter's term? The pair have traded blows ever since. There were some confused sponsors last year too when the T&TFF publicly declared themselves bankrupt in the middle of lucrative long-term deals and without prior consultation with their corporate partners. It is not Bermuda that threaten the pride of Trinidad and Tobago football. It is the arrogance of its stakeholders.
In November 2006, when Groden officially announced the blacklisting of 17 World Cup players ”Neal & Massy Caledonia midfielder Densill Theobald eventually backed down and was welcomed back into the fold ”he stated that the T&TFF was willing to enter the 2010 qualifiers with youth players if necessary. When World Cup defender Brent Sancho offered to pay his way home to try out for the national squad in January, Corneal declined the offer and explained that the technical staff had chosen a new direction.
How foolish do Groden and Corneal look now in light of the expected but still startling deterioration of the World Cup squad? Warner, during a press conference on Monday, claimed that Sancho and Birchall were ignored because they could not find clubs rather than by any dark design. He is, at best, misinformed. Birchall has played regular for the Coventry City reserve outfit in the England Championship division while Sancho closed off the 2007/08 season as a starter for promoted Scotland Second Division club Ross County.
In contrast, teenage midfielder Khaleem Hyland has not played domestic football or even trained with a professional club since last December but remains a regular while Osei Telesford and Darryl Roberts both won selections while without employers. This is not to say that Hyland and company are not worth their picks. But, on recent evidence, there is enough to suggest that the tactical acumen of several past players including Birchall could benefit the present campaign.
There is always hope for success once the relevant parties have a collective will to improve and the administrators are not the only culpable group. The technical staff's decision to start with a 3-5-2 system seemed reasonable enough considering the dearth in quality full backs over the years. But not everyone in the squad looked especially interested in supporting the coach's ideas.
Sunderland winger Carlos Edwards is a remarkable athlete and a natural right back and winger stuffed into one outfit. But he made little effort to cover his usual ground during the first half on Sunday. Team captain Aurtis Whitley caught his attention at one point, gave him a polite wink and pointed to an unattended Bermudan in the space between Edwards and T&T's right side central defender Kareem Smith. Edwards made a face in the direction of the opposing winger, Khano Smith, as if to suggest that the play was unworthy of attention. But it was Smith who skinned his namesake Kareem to create Bermuda's opener.
By no stretch of the imagination was Edwards the only player to fall short of his usual high standards on the weekend. The Warriors tried to regain control after the interval but the horse had bolted. The same might be said about the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign soon. The cracks have been there for some time. Presumably, though, players, administrators, government officials, sponsors, fans and the media all want the same thing, which is to have a successful national team. It is time for a call to repair. And everyone knows who holds the key.
