Technical Director of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation Lincoln ‘Tiger’ Phillips was not expressing too much disappointment after witnessing Trinidad and Tobago go down to Haiti 2-1 in the final of the Digicel Caribbean Cup.
Instead the former national goalkeeper was full of praise for the young team and dished out high commendation for the work the TT Pro League has been doing.
“This is a period of development, this is a young team made up of mainly our local players and this augurs well for the Professional Football League,” Phillips told ttproleague.com.
“The Professional League is definitely improving, the players are improving and you can see the team, despite not bringing home the trophy showed tremendous character especially in the second half. The boys showed good composure under pressure and in the last 20 minutes they held possession of the ball, and applied pressure on the Haitians and if things went our way we could have very well equalized and things could have been different, but that was not too be.”
Mr. Phillips is of the opinion Haiti was marginally the better of the two teams, “Overall Haiti was the better team on the night, every player on their line up was more experienced and more skilled than the Trinidad and Tobago players, but even though they had an edge on us tactically, we showed good determination as we battled hard and evened the game out in the second period, and this is very encouraging, because this team was only put together for a few weeks and to perform so well in this competition, as Technical Director I am very happy with what I have seen.”
Assessing the scenario going forward, Mr. Phillips while admitting we are on the right track, pointed out we still have a lot of work to do.
“What the performance by this team tells you is that we have a good base from which to prepare our launch for 2010, but we still have a number of areas to work on, we have to work on our first touch, we have learn the importance of possession and patience and we have to play the game with a lot more intensity.”
“The only way we can get these things right is by practice, playing as much international games as possible, once we do this things will start falling into place,” ended the Technical Director.