from : Trinidadexpress.com
Tonight Trinidad and Tobago's management skills will be tested both on and off the football field. On the field the question will be whether the managers of Trinidad and Tobago's football at the highest level have done all that is necessary to bring the national side to the heights required to beat the regional and, indeed, international power house that is Mexico.
That will take some doing but Trinidad and Tobago has beaten Mexico more than once before. The Mexicans, having already qualified for the World Cup finals in Germany, may not be up to their usual intensity and, perhaps most importantly, has coach Leo Beenhakker done enough to cause nationals to wonder how better we might have fared were he given charge from the very beginning of the current campaign?
In addition, the national team seems to be warming more and more to the home support it has been receiving from fans who, certainly on the evidence of the game against Guatemala, have become far more vociferous than has been their wont, the lessons gleaned from all those ubiquitous televised football games apparently not having been lost.
Tonight, that support is likely to be the highest of the tournament to date which means, given FIFA's renewed insistence on heightened security, that management skills will have to be demonstrated off the field as thousands enter and leave the stadium, the sensible behaviour in the stadium itself being a given.
We expect that the security forces will be in evidence not only in and around the stadium but also along the regular commuter routes, given the possibility that there will be malcontents lurking around with the aim of committing crimes under the cover of the night, Trinidad and Tobago, to put it mildly, being somewhat of a different place to what it was, say, 16 years ago in 1989.
Even as we welcome the Mexicans who, by now, must have become very accustomed to our place, we urge our team literally to put their best feet forward so that our World Cup qualifying hopes will continue to be kept alive, not so much as a distraction from the problems that beset us but as additional evidence of our ability to mix it up with some of the world's best in various spheres of activity. Having said that, however, let us remember that football is but a beautiful game, geared for leisure and entertainment.
