Disappointed but not disjointed. That was the mood of Trinidad and Tobago head coach Wim Rijsbergen after T&T faltered in the final of the Digicel Caribbean Cup, losing 2-1 to Haiti on Tuesday.
Rijsbergen had his four-game unbeaten streak clipped by the visitors but he had a lot to take out of the affair and the overall two-week experience.
“After the semi final we saw that Haiti had physically a little better group than we had. As I keep telling the boys every game if we had started with a little bit more aggression… you saw the difference in the second half when we had to come back from 2-0. Hopefully this will be a good lesson again,”Rijsbergen said.
“Of course we have seen all the games and there is still a lot of improvements to make and we will keep working on that. Overall we were satisfied with the group… they played with all their heart. You can’t blame them all but we tried hard and we saw a good crowd and they should be proud of the team and hopefully we can try next time to win this Cup.”
When asked what the immediate future would be for the runners up, Rijsbergen said he had every intention of working with the bunch but also wanted to improve the weak links within the team.
“We have seen a lot of new players and of course we will try to improve this team so in the future you could see some other faces in some international games. We will try to get the best team possible. We have seen some weaknesses and we will try to improve that in training. But on the other side we are also looking for some guys to replace some weaker parts in our team. That’s part of the future. It would (have been) nice with this group to win the Cup but they have to wait a little big longer.”
He added there could be a couple changes to the team which departs for matches against Panama and Costa Rica next week.
Going back to the loss, Rijsbergen pointed that his team didn’t start with the same aggression as the earlier 3-1 win over Haiti. And he felt T&T didn’t pressure sufficiently, also failing to utilize the flanks and poor crossing on the evening didn’t help, also referring to Leslie Fitzpatrick’s wasted last gasp corner.
Asked what he was pleased with from this tournament, the Dutchman added “Everybody was negative when we played the first game and if you work hard with a group they way we did last couple of weeks then you see the improvement. It wasn’t enough to win the tournament… but we don’t have time to work with a group. We only had it for 6 weeks in the World Cup before. One of the big problems we have is not a lot of time to work together. With these boys at least we had a chance to start from nothing and try to get a good group and we have seen the improvement. Hopefully we (will have) more time but it will be difficult because there are a lot of other things (in the way), the kind of competitions and people with thoughts of how we should do it. We proved that you can do it if you put the work in. They did better than we all expected and now we must look forward to see where this can lead to,” Rijsbergen added.