Pan connoisseurs, and especially those not bound by parochialism, must be wondering to themselves if things are really so bad with steelbands in the South that none could make into the Panorama Finals, and on home soil at Skinner Park to boot.
Well, rest assured they are not alone in scratching their heads about the overall standards of performance. Anyone really interested in the welfare of local football or regional cricket must be doing the same.
As if the result itself wasn't bad enough, the scathing post-game comments by head coach Wim Rijsbergen, readily endorsed by assistant Anton Corneal, in the aftermath of Sunday's 4-0 drubbing administered by Costa Rica suggest that all of the hype, excitement and greater exposure in the wake of last year's World Cup finals appearance have achieved almost nothing in lifting the overall standard of football in Trinidad and Tobago.
In openly questioning whether most of the players wearing the national colours in Alajuela were capable of making it on the international stage, the Dutchman was in fact issuing a searing indictment of the quality of play in the T&T Pro League.
By taking that point even further and doubting the desire of his current crop of charges to improve, Rijsbergen has all but dismissed the country's premier domestic competition as a petty, insular exercise.
In vowing to search for more talent in the United States and other parts of the world-a statement reminiscent of his predecessor and fellow countryman Leo Beenhakker almost exactly a year ago in the countdown to Germany '06-the coach has made it crystal clear that the players now being produced in the Pro League cannot be relied upon to take this country beyond the level of Caribbean competition, if only because they are not prepared to work hard enough.
Rijsbergen's insistence, based on football writer Ian Prescott's report in yesterday's Express, that players hoping to be part of the CONCACAF Gold Cup effort in June and the next World Cup qualifying campaign "have to be prepared to do work besides just training with the national team" sounded eerily like the repeated lament of a succession of West Indies cricket team coaches over the past decade.
Is it a question of becoming complacent in a comfort zone, of being a very big fish in a muddy little pond? Must we be so reliant on exposing our rough diamonds to the finishing schools of clubs in Europe and elsewhere if their abundant talent is fully able to express itself at the very highest level?
If the answer to those questions is a deafening "Yes!" then Pro League officials need to undertake a serious reassessment of their competition on the basis of whether it has actually resulted in the improvement in standards.
If it has, then at least as far as Rijsbergen and Corneal are concerned, it is still woefully below the level they expect from international players.
It will be interesting to hear the responses from the likes of Larry Romany and Dexter Skeene to this broadside, that is, if they haven't already done so elsewhere in today's sports section.
In this same theme of standards of play, what has become of cricket in the Leewards Islands? Yes, they got off to a promising start on Monday in their final-round match against the Windwards (213 for one), but whether or not they have prospered further since then, the alarming decline in standards in those territories must be cause for concern in the context of the overall state of the game in the region.
This is not to ignore the seemingly perennial plight of the Windwards as the poor relations of West Indies cricket, but something seems to have gone very wrong-and very quickly-for the Leewards to plummet to the level that was evident in their four-day fixture against Trinidad and Tobago a fortnight ago.
It is one thing to celebrate the victories of the national team and the outstanding contributions of bright young talents, although these must also be appreciated in the context of the overall quality of the competition, but we should not be so myopic as to ignore what is an obvious malaise in a collection of islands noted for producing a succession of aggressive, confident cricketers.
You don't expect a Richards, Richardson, Roberts and Ambrose to fall off every coconut tree in Antigua, but surely the administrators in the land of 365 beaches, and those responsible for the development of the game in St Kitts and Nevis, along with Anguilla, must be called to account by the West Indies Cricket Board for answers as to what is going on over there. They shouldn't have to go too far because the WICB is based in St John's anyway!
This issue doesn't mean that the state of the game in the Windwards automatically becomes less of a priority, because the only way that West Indies cricket will once again be a consistently powerful force is if all its many and varied components are functioning as close to optimum level as can be expected given the many challenges faced, financial and otherwise, by the game in our part of the world.
Just as going to Germany last year may have papered over huge cracks in our football, preoccupation with the impending World Cup should not be at the cost of neglecting the cricketing ills in so many of our idyllic outposts.