Keith Smith
Trinidadexpress.com
"Suppose we'd lose." That's what I said to some glum faces surrounding me the morning after that bad match that the national football team played.
It's not that I, too, wasn't disappointed. It was that I wasn't about to despair, not because to do so would be pointlessly unpatriotic but because, on the evidence, I didn't see how it would be impossible for us to beat Bahrain in Bahrain.
We might not, but not if the team, as it has done in the past, manages to give one of its better performances playing with its back against the wall, Messrs Yorke, Latapy, Beenhakker and company having fallen flat even as Trinbagonians in their tens of thousands were ready to raise the champagne or the puncheon depending, of course, on their particular class.
I put in Mr Beenhakker there, deliberately, not because he is not a top class coach or because we do not have to be grateful to him for bringing us where we are when it seemed to be all over before the burying, but because coaches, too, are human and pressure, sometimes, gets to them.
Long retired coach "Sufferer" (Hercules) of the now defunct Essex whose enduring claim to fame was to have won the FA Cup here with only one really class player (Sammy Llewellyn, admittedly of the highest class) who first told me that the main coaching challenge was to stop the opposing team from playing its natural game while, I imagine, having his team play theirs.
In this context, Beenhakker came out second best on the night, Bahrain's Peruzovic all but squeezing "Latas", Stern and Yorke out of the game, "Latas" and Yorke, it seemed to me, showing their age at this stage of their long football life.
Stifling defence is the ace Peruzovic not only came to play but proclaimed in interviews before the game and did play. In the event it worked and it is no use arguing that, but for his goalkeeper, T&T might have won because a more-than-good goalkeeper is part of a stifling defence and, even so, our own defence was caught open on a couple occasions and had the Bahrainis capitalised we could very well have lost.
This, as I began by saying, would have given us a mountain to climb or, if you prefer, a desert to walk instead of being in a position of having a bit of a mountain to climb or, again if you prefer, a patch of desert to endure. None of which is to suggest that T&T is going to have it easy and certainly not as easy as so many of us expected it to happen, Saturday last, Trinbagonians, not for the first, being victims of their own exaggerated ambitions.
Me? I have absorbed the lessons of 1989 when I was part of the pre-game euphoria (my detractors insisted at the time that I encouraged, even fuelled it and they may well have been right) and I approached the home run with a certain degree, let's be honest here, of trepidation born of the knowledge that we were up against an unknown quantity.
Well, now we know what we are up against-a decently organised team whose first instinct is to defend its goal rather than go for goal with the expectation of snapping up any chance or two that might come its way. Such a team is not easy to play against, the Czech Republic, for one, finding that out against the Greeks in the last European Cup finals, teams losing against the Greeks, protesting that they were playing negative football.
Well, negative football is still football and what is a coach to do if he isn't gifted with skilful players Trinidad and Tobago, to my mind (and, by his own admission, Peruzovic's too) being better in this department not by a mile, mind you, T&T 2005 not being T&T 1989 and certainly not T&T 1973, but enough to make the difference if we manage to pull out our A-game.
What that game is, I have to tell you, I don't know. Much has been made of the team's showing against Mexico but that was a second to third-rate unmotivated Mexican team (having already qualified for Germany) so, maybe, the home game against Guatemala is a better indicator. What I do know, however, is the best weapon against "stifling defence" is superior skill, which is what we have to display to telling effect tomorrow.
In addition the experienced Beenhakker would have had to review all his options even to not starting with Latapy and Yorke, leaving them for some last-gasp magic later on while letting his younger, lesser-known players have a run at the Bahrainis. All this is pure whimsy on my part since I claim none of the technical know-how nor, indeed, of the national football character, it being a source of bewilderment to me that the team should have suffered from "big game jitters" on the night, playing yourself before a huge home crowd being, I have always thought, child's play in this Carnival country.
But, then, again, maybe the difference is that in Carnival you playing with against yourself and not against anybody. Here, then, perhaps, is a clue to what we should do-play our own game come what may and by sheer dazzle keep the Bahrainis at bay. The one caveat? That that dazzle is more than a mirage in the national mind.
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