THERE’S nothing like a World Cup qualifier to get almost 20,000 people from Trinidad and Tobago and a handful of visitors from Guatemala together without anyone feeling a burning sensation in some part of their body.
For those who haven’t had the misfortune to experience it, that is police-speak for getting shot. But where we were two Fridays ago was a non-combat zone, with most everyone assembled in unanimous support of T&T’s Soca Warriors.
There were bright smiles and high fives, especially with the team collecting the point that takes it onto the next round of qualifying for the big dance, the Concacaf Hexagonal, where it gets serious from the first game to the last.
The last time we were in the mix with a chance to get to the Copa Mundial was 11 years ago, when some of the spectators at the Hasely Crawford Stadium on September 2, 2016 were running around in pampers. And a few weren’t even born when T&T held Bahrain to a draw at the same venue, while those brave Trini souls who ventured to the Middle East for the away leg dodged stones and other missiles after Dennis Lawrence, one of this country’s unsung heroes, secured a famous victory, with a towering header that booked our ticket to Germany, where T&T was, and still is, the smallest-ever country to put its name among FIFA World Cup finalists.
Now, we have the good fortune to contend again for that rare honour, which will give us something else to think about besides crime over the next 12 months.
The names this time around don’t slip off the tongue as easily as Dwight Yorke, Russell Latapy, Shaka Hislop and Stern John did all those years ago, when the above-named quartet had already earned their stripes with big clubs in the UK and Europe, adding proven experience to a squad that lacked quality in certain areas.
But together, under the supervision of a wily old fox named Leo Beenhakker, they got their act together when it mattered most and took us all the way to Dortmund, Nuremberg and Kaiserslautern, and all points in between, for a once-in-a-lifetime journey that those of us who were fortunate enough to accompany them will treasure forever.
Okay, we can spew all the flowery prose we like and revive sweet memories of 2006, but the harsh reality ten years later is that we have very little chance of setting off on another summertime excursion through Europe in 2018.
Yes, the honest ones among us will admit that Guatemala could have put tears in our eyes that Friday night, denying us the point that got us into the Hex. And we all know what happened four days later, when the US reasserted itself as the top dog in the zone with an authoritative 4-0 victory over T&T.
Now, it turns out that three of our players broke curfew a couple nights before the Guatemala encounter to enjoy a boat cruise in the Gulf of Paria. And one of the guilty trio even scored both goals which earned us the 2-2 draw with the Central Americans.
So all I can think about is that if coach Stephen Hart had benched those guys, instead of fining them—or both—we wouldn’t be looking forward to the road to Russia and the national football programme would be another smouldering mess, once again failing to live up to its undoubted potential.
Instead, we are very much alive and now it is all about how much these players want it, whether they are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to try to display their talents on football’s grandest stage—to play hard or party hard.
The supporters who were at the stadium earlier this month will be back again come November 11, when Costa Rica come calling…actually, not all of them because some of my friends were grumbling about how much trouble they had to go through to find a cold beer, and others didn’t like the long wait in line to get into the venue. So unless the TTFA gets its act together, there will be a few seats to fill.
But the die-hard Warrior fans will return with their flags and face paint, decked in red, and as long as skipper Kenwyne Jones and his troops are giving it their all, they will stick it out right to the end in October next year, when the US are our final opponents.
As another pessimistic friend said, let’s hope we don’t need a point then, we having lived through November 19, 1989, when a point was all we needed to get to Italia 1990…and we all know what happened that day.
But, for now, I’ll be the eternal optimist.
I have the utmost respect for coach Hart, who knows how to get the best out of his players. Hopefully, those players will return that respect and not abandon him to have a good time.