Head coach Wim Rijsbergen was pleased to see that members of the National team were able to concentrate solely on their game on Saturday evening and put on the kind of display they did in the 5-0 win over St Vincent and the Grenadines at the Hasely Crawford Stadium.
“It’s a good win and of course you know we didn’t have a very good preparation because most of the talking was about other things. But I am happy that with all the talking they still knew what they had to do and they had a good performance on the field,” Rijsbergen said.
“Of course for us it was a good win because the last couple of days were not the best days for preparations. I saw a lot of guys having a lot of conversations and meetings but most of it was not about football but other things. I was happy for a moment they could separate that.
“It is very hard still to beat any team in the world today. Hopefully something positive comes out of all the meetings. I’m not part of any conversation in this manner between the Federation and the players, I’m here to coach and I’m not here to be in politics,” Rijsbergen added.
He went on to speak highly of the performance of young Kerry Baptiste, who got his first goal for T&T on the evening as well as Nigel Daniel and substitute Andre Toussaint showed, adding that it was important to have them playing and training with the more experienced players.
“That’s the reason why I always say if you want to get this improvement with the local players you have to use them with the better experienced players and this is why we had to cancel some games before and hopefully that will happen in the future too where we can get the experienced guys with the age to help us to the Gold Cup and help us in the qualification to the next World Cup with a mix from both sides.”
Rijsbergen will now look ahead to Wednesday’s friendly against Panama as well as the November fixture away to Austria and a proposed training camp in the US.
“The spirit was good after the last couple days of conversation and they proved that they are professionals and that is what I like - that they can separate the things and I hope to get the same thing against Panama.
“We still have to play Austria in November and then we have a mini camp in the US to lookat players there and in Canada. Hopefully by that time we will have a good player pool for the next Digicel Cup and Gold Cup,” He hinted that the squad for the Digicel Cup in late January will comprise mostly of home-based pros.
St Vincent coach Zoran Vranes meantime said he wasn’t totally dissatisfied by his team’s display.
“I am not totally disappointed because I know it would be tough. I didn’t expect 5-0 at all but I also got what I was looking for out of the game and we will have a different team in January for the finals,” said the Yugoslav-born coach.