Rumour has it that the real reason for Sir Trevor McDonald retiring from his job as senior ITV news presenter in London last week was to try and get a piece of the action as a member of the Trinidad and Tobago contingent at the 2006 World Cup football finals.
As a born and bred Trini, he apparently feels that even though his best playing days are some distance behind him, the current preoccupation with outsourcing talent at least gives him a chance of displacing Shaun Fuentes as the team's media officer.
Now that the team has overcome considerable odds, and confounded the dismissive critics like myself, in making history for our small country, is the reward for some of them going to be a comfortable couch and a wide-screen television to watch the "live" coverage of the games from Germany?
There is, of course, no certainty that Leo Beenhakker's window-shopping exercise will result in any players being drafted into the final 23-man World Cup squad.
The Dutchman is really only doing his job as far as he sees it, which is to get the best possible team together. He is a professional, with no time or energy to waste on sympathy and sentiment when it comes to charting the way forward.
Fine. But even if the wily tactician is only interested in results on the field, surely there is something to be said for loyalty, for showing faith in the players who were involved throughout much of the long, arduous almost two-year journey of World Cup qualification.
Indeed, why should there be any attempt at all to recruit anyone?
To trot out the impressive credentials of the hopefuls and outline exactly how they will strengthen the team in which area of the field are both arguments that miss the point.
Even if no-one fits Beenhakker's bill and the squad remains virtually unchanged, this unseemly exercise does nothing for any increased appreciation of the values of unity and nationhood we may wish to nurture by the Germany experience.
Saying in defence that this is what everyone else does doesn't make it right. To point out that Dwight Yorke and Russell Latapy turned their backs on the national team more than three years ago and were persuaded to rejoin earlier this year is irrelevant. They are, and have always been, identified as Trinidad and Tobago footballers, even when they claimed to be frustrated by the game's administrators here.
Has Chris Birchall always been identified as a T&T national on the football field, you ask in response? No, but-and this is the critical point as far as I am concerned-he joined the campaign when we were being written off and has made a significant contribution on the road to glory.
There was absolutely nothing to prevent anyone from anywhere forcefully expressing his desire to play for Trinidad and Tobago all this while. So why the deafening silence for so long, and even in the case of one or two, a dismissive almost disdainful reaction to repeated overtures?
But now the picture has changed. The two-by-four banana republic is going to the World Cup, and now everyone who can kick a lime wants in.
Last week I read a comment by a player in which he stated "he felt Trinidadian". Eh heh? So how come he didn't let the T&TFF know before November 16 that he was always possessed of this innate desire to arrive late, disobey traffic signals and sell lingerie on the pavement down Frederick Street?
You really can't fault these players from wherever for wanting to get into the squad. It is every footballer's dream to play in the World Cup finals.
But the reason the World Cup is the most prestigious and all-encompassing of global events is because-even with all of this propaganda about globalisation-it is country versus country.
Would you go to watch Caricom play the European Union in anything?
By the way, if Beenhakker does go the way of recruiting talent from afar to boost the squad, will they be available for the next round of Gold Cup qualification, or will we be treated to a succession of heartfelt excuses about pressure from managers of big clubs who signed these "nationals" on the strength of their World Cup pedigree?
The World Cup finals experience is about feeling a sense of pride that the 11 players on the field and the others on the bench against Sweden in Dortmund on June 10 are truly representative of us, that by their commitment they have made fools of sceptics like myself and have earned the right to be central figures in one of the greatest moments in our nation's history.
And it is about taking the game here at home forward from that experience and not just treating it as a once-in-a-lifetime free-for-all in which everyone jostles to get their snout in the trough, leaving nothing meaningful behind when it is all over.
When goal-scoring hero Dennis Lawrence returned from Bahrain, one of the first things he talked about was the rampant crime and violence here. He hoped that the team's success would inspire restless youth to do something positive with their lives.
His finger is on the pulse of the nation because he is one of us. Even if he struggles on the biggest stage in the game, he, like his current national teammates, deserve to play for us in Germany.