Soca Warriors touch down in Port-Au-Prince.
By: Shaun Fuentes (TTFF).Trinidad and Tobago’s senior footballers made their arrival in Port-Au-Prince at about 5pm on Friday in the presence of heavy UN Police personnel ahead of Sunday’s friendly international against the hosts at the National Stadium here.
The T&T team, after a two-hour stop over in Miami, was greeted by Haitian Football Federation officials and a Digicel Welcome band. There was a large gathering outside Arrivals at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport but more noticeable was the dozen or so armed officers on UN jeeps which kept close watch on the T&T contingent as they occupied the bus for some thirty minutes while awaiting the luggage arrival. Francisco Maturana looked on from the bus doorway as several walked past staring, some gesticulating a beating for the visitors on Sunday. What followed during the following thirty minutes as the bus headed through part of the City and to the Karibe Hotel was beyond any of the player’s wildest imagination.
“What we have in Trinidad is like heaven to here,” Cornell Glen told his teammates as the bus made its way past an area of four dirt filled playing fields occupied by dozens of youngsters in rags running down footballs. A couple fields seemed to have more organized activities than others, some attracting more crowds but with the majority of groups made up purely of football crazy kids.
In Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, the average family lives on about US$460 per year, less and in some cases much lower than half what the T&T players make in a month. The children here live every day with the odds stacked against them but football is a way of hope for them and parents sign contracts with the Football Federation to allow their kids to enter the Goal Project Center. But only 200 or so kids can be involved and the rest have to keep on kicking in mud in hope of better days.
“Imagine all you seeing is youngsters and poor people walking the road or playing football. Some selling almost anything to make a living in all that dust,” Densill Theobald said. “Things might be hard at times back in ‘Trini’ but we really have to say that we have things nice as well oui.”
The T&T team liaison officer promised close to 15,000 at the National Stadium for Sunday’s game which kicks off at 5pm (6pm T&T time).
“Dwight Yorke still has a lot, a lot of fans in Haiti. I think they read somewhere that he will be playing for Trinidad again so some of them have been asking us if he was coming to Haiti,” he added. Yorke broke the offside track to score for T&T in a 1-1 draw in a World Cup qualifier here in May 2000. This time the Haitians are hoping to meet T&T in the final round, feeling its their best chance to progress out of a semi-final grouping with Suriname, Costa Rica and El Salvador.
In the meantime though, after checking in at what is thankfully a hotel of decent standard. Francisco Maturana and his men will get down to business in what has so far been dry conditions, at 5pm on Saturday as they look ahead to Sunday’s encounter.
Video: Warriors arrival in Haiti
