This country’s “Soca Warriors” will be looking to up their ante and rebound from Tuesday’s 4-0 defeat to Romania when they face Estonia in tomorrow’s friendly international in Tallinn.
The T&T squad was scheduled to arrive in Tallinn last night with home-based defenders Kareem Moses and Aubrey David joining the squad.
The T&T Football Federation (TTFF) is in the process of finalizing one more warm-up encounter against a Central American opponent for late June ahead of the Concacaf Gold Cup which begins the first week of July in the USA, but tomorrow’s match is significant as the players know what selection in the final Gold Cup squad could rest on their performances in this encounter.
The defeat meant that T&T has now gone five matches without scoring, losing four and drawing one dating back to the Caribbean Cup Final against Cuba in December.
Tuesday’s match was witnessed by 10,000 spectators including former Romanian star Gheorghe Hagi and former T&T head coach Leo Beenhakker and ex-national Under-20 head coach Zoran Vranes.
The Romanians were excellent hosts, affording the T&T squad the opportunity to train at state of the art facilities in Buftea and Bucharest while Romanian Association president Mircea Sandu and his officials engaged in healthy discussions with TTFF president Raymond Tim Kee and general secretary Sheldon Phillips on initiatives that could benefit both countries.
Despite the loss, Shabazz said there were still some areas of T&T’s play that left reason for optimism.
“We’ve got to lift our heads after the loss because while we were beaten 4-0 there were some positives coming out of it. There will always be positives for a country like T&T when you come to a play like Romania and play in an environment like we did at the National Arena, said co-head coach Jamaal Shabazz.
“How we take this into our future as a national team is what determines how exactly we would have benefitted from the experience.
“Of course we conceded two goals from dead ball situations which we did not handle well and this is something we will work on when we have extended time together. I thought at times we have Romania too much respect and we defended too deeply which is when they were able to punish us.”
“On the positive side, we saw Justin Hoyte play a full 90 minutes and looked very encouraging. We saw Andre Boucaud also giving us something to look forward to with his performance and also players like Shahdon Winchester and Jamal Gay coming off the bench and offering us additional options,” Shabazz added.
Some of the names missing from the current squad include Racing Genk midfielder Khaleem Hyland, Carlos Edwards, Kenwyne Jones, Belgium-based defender Sheldon Bateau, midfielder Hughtun Hector as well as centrebacks Carlyle Mitchell and Seon Power.
“Our pool is not massive but we have players who can definitely bring more to the team and we’ll only know how much they can contribute when we have them in game situations or training camps like this one at the moment,” Shabazz said.
Estonia meantime also played on Monday night, losing 2-0 to Belarus at the A Le Coq Arena in Tallinn.