Brazil bound?
T&T Newsday
Trinidad and Tobago against India does not normally conjure up images of a football match. However, this afternoon, at the Hasely Crawford Stadium, it will be the TT Soca Warriors playing against India, in our first, and apparently only warm-up match before we set out, bound for Brazil and the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals.
But we have played India before, in football, at the same venue. That was in 1984, at a time when our football was deep in the doldrums, and largely divided by a rival league, which had absorbed most of the better senior level players in the land. We lost that match to India, by a score of 3-1.
While that division in our football lasted through the first half of the decade of the eighties, and affected our qualifying matches for Spain ’82 and Mexico ’86, there was a remarkable, but hardly acknowledged (even to this day) youth development programme taking place. TT hosted CONCACAF Under 17 and Under 19 tournaments in 1983 (U-17), 1984 and 1986 (U-19), 1988 (U-17), and saw our youngsters competing progressively against the likes of Mexico, USA, Canada and Costa Rica. That programme, culminating an otherwise difficult decade for our football, created the Strike Squad of 1989, and the TT Under-20 squad which went to the FIFA World Under-20 Finals in Portugal’ 91.
We look backwards here to draw some comfort from the fact that during the past five years, we have again seen our Under-17s and our Under-20s qualify for world finals and compete with honour. So while we have not heard much of these youngsters since those tournaments, but acknowledge that some are playing well with professional clubs overseas, we believe they will provide for Otto Pfister the same reservoir of natural talent, honed to world level in youth competitions, as Gally Cummings found when he took over as TT coach in late 1987.
We have considerable sympathy for the task facing Mr Pfister. He is just two weeks away from kicking off our World Cup campaign, and he is yet to have seen his squad in action. He will not have access to Kenwyne Jones or any of our overseas-based players. This may be the reason he has invited veteran (and the country’s top international goal-scorer) Stern John to join the squad today. He will need a seasoned and disciplined veteran to guide (not to lead, for Stern is not the captain) our team in their first international encounter in almost a year.
India ranks 153 in FIFA’s international standings, slightly higher than our first competitive opponent, Bermuda (185), whom we play on September 2. Our other two opponents for our first round in World Cup Qualifying are Barbados (145) and Guyana (114). However, we at number 88, should take no comfort from these rankings, which are not really guides by which any coach should judge an opponent. Bermuda, Barbados and Guyana have stretched us in recent years, and we would do well to select our best possible squads, ensuring that all overseas players required are released by their clubs as early as possible, and certainly no later than the FIFA regulations provide.
We wish Otto Pfister and his squad the very best this afternoon. A win would be good, but we would prefer to see that he can produce a good flowing game, upon which he can build when he brings in the players he will call from overseas.
And we urge everyone to become a supporter from this afternoon, and find themselves in the stadium, cheering our new Soca Warriors on to Brazil!
