Given a fresh mandate by the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association (TTFA), Angus Eve is ready to move the game along for the national senior team.
“We need to widen the pool of players that we have. We need to expose more of the young players at this point in time,” Eve told the Express yesterday, a day after the TTFA announced that it had extended his tenure to March, 2024.
Eve was first hired on an interim basis in 2021 to replace Terry Fenwick following T&T’s failure to get to the final round of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
He recently took T&T through a CONCACAF Nations League B campaign after which, T&T earned promotion to League A after Nicaragua’s disqualification. His last assignment was the CONCACAF Gold Cup in June when T&T failed to get out of their group which also included the United States, Jamaica and St Kitts-Nevis.
In commenting on the decision to stick with Eve, Normalisation Committee (NC) chairman Robert Hadad said: “Angus has come into the role bringing stability, quality and belief to the team. We have navigated challenges together along the way and believe that he is the right individual and character to take us into League A.”
Eve himself was happy for the TTFA’s display of confidence. “They have shown a level of faith in what me and the staff have been rebuilding, especially the players that we have been exposing. and also (it is) a satisfaction in that we have met all of the mandates that they have given to us,” Eve said.
That mandate included qualifying for the 2022 and 2023 CONCACAF Gold Cup group stages and getting the team into the Nations League A. “The signs are there where we are progressing,” Eve added.
As he looked forward to what he described as the “massive task” of qualifying the Soca Warriors for the 2026 World Cup, Eve stressed the need to expose more players.
“I know our country is result-based but over the past two years we have been building to something. We have been moving in progression,” he said. “Some people don’t like process, but now is the time that we have to bring in a lot more of the younger players into the team along with the senior players of course; keeping some of them around to try help build towards the final goal which is trying to qualify for a World Cup.”
Eve will continue to work with a pool of 60 players. And asked if it was time to move on from some of his senior players, Eve noted: “All of the senior players will still be a part of that 60-man squad. But in widening the pool, because every window that we have it’s a competition, we don’t have the affordability to expose people in practice matches like used to happen in the past.
“So now that every window is now a competition match, we now have to play these (newer) players in competition matches and it’s not going to be a bad thing in the sense whereby they will be playing games that mean something, so they have to put out their best.”
Eve’s first assignment in his new tenure will be a League A clash with Curacao at the Hasely Crawford Stadium on September 7.
T&T and Curacao are in Group A of League A, along with Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador and Martinique. Group B contains Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras, Cuba, Suriname, and Grenada.
After group stage play in the FIFA match windows in September and October, each group’s first and second-place finishers will advance to the quarter-finals, where they will join the four top-ranked League A national teams.
Speaking of the preparation for the Curacao match, Eve said, “we continue to monitor what the players are doing on the outside and what the players are doing here.”
In particular, Eve will be concerned about the fitness of Greece-based attacking player Levi Garcia, who picked up a thigh injury on Tuesday in AEK Athens’ 1-0 loss to Royal Antwerp in their UEFA Champions League first leg playoff in Belgium.
“We tried making contact with him today, was unsuccessful but we’ll try before the day is out, hopefully we’ll get on to him,” the coach said.
SOURCE: T&T Express