Despite the lack of success around the National Men’s Senior team in 2010, there’s still a lot of progress made in various other areas from the National Women’s teams to the other men youth teams and coaching development.
This was the synopsis of TTFF Technical Adviser Keith Look Loy on Sunday as he relayed his views on the happenings during the 2010 calendar and looked ahead to the coming year which promises to be another hectic and event-filled one for the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation.
The failure of the “Soca Warriors” to advance to the Concacaf Gold Cup grabbed most of the attention during the latter part of 2010, but mere months before, the staging of the 2010 FIFA Under 17 Women’s World Cup and the exploits of the National Women’s team captured the imagination of all on local shores.
“I think on a different front there was a fair amount of progress made,” Look Loy told TTFF Media. “And I’m referring here to Women’s football where for the first time we established a coherent women’s program which deals with a pool of age group players from under 13 and under 15 come right up which is now a development path for players to move into various national teams,” he explained.
“We also made significant stride in on field performance where we won our first game at any World Cup level against Chile in the opening game of the Women’s World Cup and we had the Senior Women’s team finishing second in the Central American and Caribbean Games to a Conmebol team in Venezuela. This again is something that has never happened before . And it was evident that at the Gold Cup for Women, despite the results, the technical gap is steadily being closed between us and the powerhouses in Concacaf which are also the powerhouses in world football in the women’s game. We also demonstrated our ability to stage a World Cup event,” Look Loy added.
Of course while the Men’s team was able to reach a FIFA World ranking of 76 in August, 2010, the failure to achieve winning results was most noticeable. The few positive runs came during the group stage of the Digicel Caribbean Cup when T&T overcame Haiti, St Vincent/Grenadines and Guyana while picking up a lone 1-0 win over hosts Martinique and prior to that, there was a courageous showing in a 1-0 loss to Jamaica in Kingston. There was more success for the Under 17 and Under 20 Men’s teams which saw them advance to the Concacaf Final rounds towards qualification for the 2011 FIFA Under 17 and Under 20 World Cups.
“On the men’s side we were able to establish the various centres for excellence around the country which has a pool of age group boys that serves as a feeder for the various national teams in the Under 14 and Under 16 age category. It is out of these centres that the talent is coming through for the national teams but we have to continue improving on it. We have seen the national under 17 and under 20 teams showing the capacity to do well in the Caribbean tournaments but 2011 will show whether we have the potential to move on to the world stage like we did in 2007 and 2009. We were able to maintain the operations of a national youth league which was established in 2009 and hopefully we can consolidate that in 2011.”
The National Under 23 men’s team will also work towards qualification for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Two major areas of concern is the structure for club football in the regional associations or various zones in the country and the education of local coaches.
“We had the club football seminar in 2010 and hopefully we will see progress coming out of that in 2011. A platform was provided and hopefully we can build on it. I am not happy with our club football in the regional associations and this is an area we will be paying attention to.”
“With regards to coaching education, we saw the participation of the TTFF in several Concacaf courses this year and the TTFF now has its own coherent coach education programme which will continue to make strides starting in early 2011. In collaboration with the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) there will be an ongoing programme which will see our coaches being certified according to Dutch and UEFA standards. This is a first for us in the history of our football. It’s a new development and a key one. I make the point again, without good coaching there is no hope and as a result it’s essential for us to continue making strides in this area.”
Among Look Loy’s hopes is the establishment of a National Training Centre for football.
“A national training centre is another absolute essential for our national teams and our football in general. This will be used for training with the capacity to house teams and should have at least more than one type of playing surface. Of course it will cost several million dollars and it may not happen in 2011 alone but it’s something that we should definitely be heading towards,” Look Loy concluded.