The appointment of Angus Eve as the new national coach is being hailed as the right choice to lift T&T football and take it through the CONCACAF Gold Cup campaign said hard-tackling "Strike Squad" defender Brian Williams, and echoed by Brent Sancho, also a former national defender who has played with Eve during his hey-days and know him very well as a coach.
"Gus" as he is commonly called in local football circles, replaced sacked coach, Englishman Terry Fenwick, whose estimated US$20,000 per month salary has been sighted as a financial burden on the T&T Football Association (TTFA), according to Trevor Gomez, an instrumental member of the FIFA-appointed Normalisation Committee (NC), while addressing the media during a virtual press conference on Monday.
Under Fenwick, a former England World Cup player, the T&T Soca Warriors were booted out of the World Cup Qualifiers after the first round, finishing second in Group F, in a tournament inwhich only the top team was advancing to the next round. The team's under-par performance was summarised by wins against Guyana (3-0) and St Kitts and Nevis (2-0) and drawn matches against Puerto Rico (1-1) and the Bahamas (0-0).
Eve, a former national player who has coached at the national level with the Under-15s, U-17s, U-20s and at the U-23 levels, is set to commence training duties soon in preparation for T&T's opening match of the Concacaf Gold Cup Tournament against Montserrat on July 2 in the USA.
Speaking to Guardian Media Sports yesterday, Williams, the rugged "Strike Squad" defender of 1989, said on behalf of his team: "The members of the 1989 Strike Squad Company, through its executive, congratulate and fully endorse the presently appointed interim T&T national senior men's football team head coach Angus Eve and his staff. We feel once more a science of connectivity, pride and patriotism, having a local staff mainly persons who served this country's football at all levels over the years.
"This feeling also brings to us the call for a unified T&T coaches minds for the proper development and restoration of our football from the ground up."
Sancho, on the other hand, said: "One thing I know about Angus as a teammate and now as a coach is that he is an intelligent enough person to know exactly what situation he is getting himself involved in. He would have taken a holistic look at what is being asked of him and more importantly what the task is. I think he would have looked at it and believed he could be successful doing this task. There is no coach, and I know Angus as an extremely, ultra-competitive individual, that would go into a situation thinking that they would fail."
SOURCE: T&T Guardian