Back to the football future.
By Keith Smith (T&T Express).
In the wake (wake, indeed!) of a forgettable World Cup final in one of the most forgettable World Cups ever, football managers with a long , which is to say quadrennial, view, will be turning their eyes to Brazil 2014, among them Mr Jack Warner who, unless I missed it somewhere along the way, remains the Special Adviser to the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation, the nomenclature nothing but a fig-leaf for the fact that in these parts he's the man pulling the football strings.
Look, for me the definitive picture of this competition was that of Dutch coach Bert van Marwijk disgustedly taking his runner-up up silver medal off his neck and shoving it in his pocket (even as we speak it might be gathering slime at the bottom of one of those Amsterdam canals) as if he hadn't presided over a style change which not only failed to win but has left the Netherlands' beautiful football tradition in tatters, van Marwijk finding out at the final hurdle that, no, God don't like ugly.
And how ugly it was, the Dutch players piling up yellow cards as if they were making a jaundice video, the whole sickness reminding me of the time when Essex coach "Sufferer" Hercules informed me that the primary duty of a coach was to stop the opposing team from playing its own game, naive me then thinking that, rather, it was to impose his own game on whatever the other team happened to be playing, the idea of winning by any means necessary be damned as so much foolishness.
But the old "Suff'' must have known of what he spoke because in one of the biggest upsets in local football he managed to beat Malvern in an FA final, although I don't know that some (much?) of that was not due to his having in his line-up one Sammy Llewellyn, whose free-flowing football skills were among the performances that used to keep me enthralled when I still had it in me to make nightly jaunts to football games, back there in the days when Trinidad and Tobago played a style of football that had such style that it would have been unthinkable for a coach to leave the likes of Russell Latapy on the bench for fear that his advancing mid-field style would leave us so open at the back that we would most likely not have held Sweden to a draw in 2006 and held England for most of the game until that dirty win-by-all-means dog of an Englishman pulled Brent Sancho back by his locks, Peter Crouch determined to win by whatever the means necessary. Over there in Tobago, I am sure, Bertille St Clair at the time muttering in his cups:
"So yuh see now why I didn't want rastas on my team!''
Well, as they (meaning you) say, time longer than twine and "Latas'' is now the coach of the national football team and win, lose or draw, attacking football is written into his DNA, my one wonder being whether the football system, or lack of it, that Mr Warner has wrought, is throwing up the level of footballers required to play Pele's beautiful kind of game.
On the other hand the present (and future) acting Prime Minister of the People's Partnership does not only have Mrs Persad-Bissessar's ear but has publicly assigned onto himself the task of guarding her back which means that he is no longer in the position of having to beg and beseech the government for World Cup money but will get all of it as a matter of course unless, of course, he recuses himself from that particular Cabinet matter assuming, that is, that those lines of behaviour mean anything to him or the Prime Minister or, indeed, to the thousands (tens of?) Trinidadians now enthralled (that word again) by Mr Warner's increasingly ubiquitous presence, the man clearly having more hands than an Indian god, or to be politically correct, of the many representations thereof.
Well, in the fullness of football time (and betwixt and between, there's our hosting of the revenue-earning (wasting?) Women's Under-17 competition here) we shall see what we shall see shan't we. But less I leave you with the impression that I found World Cup 2010 a complete waste of my vacation time, let me hasten to add that the World Cup remains the World Cup, whatever the state of play and besides I was regularly entertained by the passion and humour of my young colleagues, Joel Villafana and Richard Saunders a stair-flight above me in TV6. To me, their Waka-Waka coverage added value to the games—wacky one-liners and all.
—To be continued
