Soca Warriors seek full points vs Martinique

On Sun­day at a me­dia press con­fer­ence both head coach Den­nis Lawrence and team cap­tain Shel­don Bateau shared their en­thu­si­asm about the match and what is at stake.

"Win­ing your home match is mas­sive­ly im­por­tant but it is how you go about get­ting that vic­to­ry is the most im­por­tant thing," said Lawrence, a for­mer na­tion­al de­fend­er.

"I think the boys will hope­ful­ly be fine and ready for the game we haven't been home for a while so I would like to be­lieve they are ex­cit­ed and look­ing for­ward to play­ing in front of T&T pub­lic again."

He is mind­ful though that the na­tion­al team still has worked to do if they are to take down the Mar­tini­quans, who scored first in the open­ing match at the Stade Pierre Alik­er Sta­di­um in Mar­tinique on Fri­day night. Cyril Man­dou­ki ben­e­fit­ted from a de­flect­ed ef­fort from a left side cor­ner, that fell in his path, fir­ing past goal­keep­er Mar­vin Philip. It was thanks to a 65th-minute penal­ty from Jo­evin Jones which helped T&T share the points with Mar­tinique.

"Some­thing we need to im­prove on our set-piece. They cause a threat from set-pieces in terms of de­liv­ery and the way they at­tack the ball," said Lawrence. "So over­all we just need to make sure we try to get on the front foot and don't al­low them to build mo­men­tum as they did in Mar­tinique which was ex­pect­ed as they were at home."

Lawrence had his play­ers rest for most of the week­end in prepa­ra­tion for to­day's match.

"I think it's more about re­cov­ery more than prepa­ra­tion be­cause the big part for us is the re­cov­ery that's the prepa­ra­tion," said Lawrence. "We play on such short no­tice and then hav­ing to trav­el and ar­riv­ing here so it's a short time so we couldn't spend much time on the foot­ball pitch so re­cov­ery was the most im­por­tant fac­tor."

Bateau too shared his ex­cite­ment say­ing: "The first was for us to re­cov­er af­ter the match and now we know what to ex­pect and we're back at home. It's been a while since we played at home."