National Senior team coach Leo Beenhakker has announced that this country’s team will next assemble back home on May 7 for their farewell affair against Peru before taking their final flight out of Piarco five days later before the 2006 World Cup.
Beenhakker finalized the team’s schedule on Friday straight up until its arrival in Rotenberg at the Landhaus Wachtelhof Hotel for their live-in base camp in Germany.
Skipper Dwight Yorke and the selected overseas-based pros will fly into Port of Spain on May 7 for the Peru encounter which will be played on May 10 and apart from the match they will partake in the nationwide motorcade and Gala Dinner before leaving the country on May 13 for the training camp in Manchester, England. The “Soca Warriors” will then leave Manchester on May 20 for Austria where they will take up base at Bad Radkersburg and stay at the Hotel Im Park.
The team will play its first training match of the camp against Austrian club champions Austria Wien on May 23 in Bad Radkersburg.
It will then face Wales in a friendly international on May 27 and then travel the short distance to Celje, Slovenia to face that country’s senior team in another international on May 31. The team will return to Bad Radkersburg and then set off for Prague where it will play its final warm-up international against Czech Republic in Prague on June 3. Beenhakker will then travel with his team from Prague to Rotenberg on June 4 ahead of its opening 2006 World Cup encounter with Sweden on June 10.
“This is the schedule we have finalized for our build up to the World Cup and it will provide us with what we need going into the tournament,” Beenhakker told TTFF Media. “Of course I am happy with it because we looked at everything to put it together and I know everything that went on.”
The team will next reassemble in London on February 26 and will hold two training sessions at the Queens Park Rangers training ground and one at the club’s match stadium at Loftus Road before the match on February 28. Following that, work will continue to be done with the home-based pros before May. Beenhakker will announce a provisional squad of thirty players next week from which the 20-man squad for the Iceland match will come from.