Soca Warriors refocusing for Guyana result

Both teams will be play­ing to avoid fin­ish­ing in the cel­lar po­si­tion in the group with both the US and Pana­ma al­ready ad­vanced to the quar­ter­fi­nals on six points each hav­ing won their two match­es so far against both teams.

T&T’s se­nior men’s team re­turned to the train­ing pitch yes­ter­day as they set out to look past Sat­ur­day’s 6-0 de­feat to hosts Unit­ed States and pick them­selves up for their fi­nal en­counter at Gold Cup 2019 against Guyana at Chil­dren’s Mer­cy Park in Kansas from 5:30 pm (6:30 pm TT Time) to­mor­row.

Both teams will be play­ing to avoid fin­ish­ing in the cel­lar po­si­tion in the group with both the US and Pana­ma al­ready ad­vanced to the quar­ter­fi­nals on six points each hav­ing won their two match­es so far against both teams.

Yes­ter­day,  head coach Den­nis Lawrence con­duct­ed a ses­sion at the Pin­na­cle Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Cen­ter in Kansas. The state-of-the-art Pin­na­cle Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Cen­ter is a new, ex­pan­sive train­ing home of Sport­ing Kansas City, which hosts clubs and na­tion­al teams from around the world.

It al­so ac­com­mo­dates the Chil­dren’s Mer­cy Sports Med­i­cine Cen­ter at Vil­lage West and the U.S. Soc­cer Na­tion­al Coach­ing Ed­u­ca­tion Cen­ter. In­clud­ed in the set up at Pin­na­cle is a one-of-a-kind pitch lab, lo­cat­ed 50 yards north of the Coach­ing Ed­u­ca­tion Cen­ter’s en­trance. The pitch lab con­sists of two full-size, syn­thet­ic turf fields with LED sports light­ing, al­low­ing for year-round us­age in all weath­er con­di­tions.

Fo­cus­ing on what is left of the So­ca War­riors Gold Cup cam­paign, T&T will try to fin­ish on a win­ning note. Ac­cord­ing to US-based play­er Ne­veal Hack­shaw who played in a left-back po­si­tion against the USA, the squad has tried to put the pre­vi­ous de­feat past them.

“The re­sult touch­es us pret­ty hard. We were fo­cused for the first 65 min­utes and then we had a bad spell af­ter that. We are now fo­cus­ing on the last game to try and get some­thing from it,” Hack­shaw told TTFA Me­dia.

“We have to stay pos­i­tive and take the game very se­ri­ous. The guys here want to win the match and we have to lis­ten to what the coach wants and go out and ap­ply our­selves,” he added.

T&T’s next as­sign­ment from here is the Con­ca­caf Na­tions League with match­es against Mar­tinique home and away in Sep­tem­ber and Hon­duras in No­vem­ber. Qatar 2022 World Cup qual­i­fi­ca­tion kicks off in Con­ca­caf next year.

“We’re try­ing to for­get about the US game but it's hard be­cause it hurts but we al­so have to start look­ing ahead to what is com­ing up with the Na­tions League and Qatar 2022 qual­i­fiers. We have to be­lieve and be pa­tient and al­so start tak­ing the steps to get over this and pre­pare our­selves for the fu­ture,” he added.

Min­neso­ta mid­field­er Kevin Moli­no is al­so com­ing to terms with T&T fail­ing to ad­vance be­yond the group stage.

He said, “It’s a dif­fi­cult loss for us (ver­sus the USA) but we have to move on… pick our­selves up and go again. It was not the best way for us in terms of the man­ner we con­ced­ed that amount of goals in twelve min­utes or so and we learn and move on. Now we have one more game which we will pre­pare for and go in there look­ing to get some­thing pos­i­tive. Then we re­turn home and start the process again be­cause there is some se­ri­ous foot­ball com­ing up and we still have that am­bi­tion to push our­selves and achieve things in the re­gion and al­so on a big­ger scale in in­ter­na­tion­al foot­ball.”