Trinidad and Tobago national football team manager Bruce Aanansen feels the seeding of the 32 participating countries ahead of the 2006 World Cup draw on Friday in Leipzig, Germany can work to the Soca Warriors' advantage.
Aanansen told the Express yesterday that a draw including one of the weaker African qualifiers and one of the less-fancied European teams in the same group could benefit T&T in their maiden World Cup campaign.
"If we end up with two European teams, let's hope one of the teams we get is one of the weaker teams, like Switzerland or so," said Aanansen. "The African teams can be quite interesting. I'm not too sure how close they are playing (against) each other, so that if we get one of the African teams and one of the (weaker) European teams, that might not be too bad a draw."
The Soca Warriors manager felt the fact T&T are the smallest nation ever to qualify for the tournament and are having their first World Cup outing could also work in his team's favour.
"At this stage when you get down to the last 32 teams, and we are one of the really outside teams, I don't think too many people have any expectations that we will win any games. But you never know, this is football. We beat Mexico 2-1, and they are better than a lot of the South American countries."
Aanansen added that what T&T need to do to compete with the more seasoned countries would be to raise the standard of their game and to play as tenaciously as they did in their victory against the Mexicans in their final CONCACAF World Cup qualifier.
"At the end of the day, we've got to really crank our game up to that level and play to the level as we played Mexico...and with the three or four weeks we have together (before the June 9 kickoff next year), we will be able to improve considerably."