"Soca in the soccer
Samba in the soccer''
Listen if you find I am making light of our latest loss and elimination from next year's African finals one of the reasons is because I knew that we were not going to make it ever since I heard the old Jack Warner-even before Wednesday's die was cast-raise the flag of the Under-20 team from whom, one gathers, the core of the 2014 team is going to be drawn.
It is not that Mr Warner came right out and said that we were not going to make it but he said enough (to my mind, anyway) to make me even more realistic about our immediate chances, the man around whom T&T's football continues to revolve, having not only done the maths but assessed the quality of the current side, not, of course, that he was ever going to publicly pillory this latest incarnation of the Soca Warriors.
Listen again(!), as I have confessed before I have no pretensions to being a football analyst of the paid professional kind or even of the amateur variety counted in Trinidad and Tobago, in particular, in the thousands and in the world, in general-in the millions and I certainly cannot claim to have the football foresight of the likes of that goalkeeping hero of mine, Lincoln Phillips, who even as Kenwyn Jones was kicking up a storm in England told me (in the setting of one of those Maple gatherings Courtenay Bartholomew used to hold) that the Jones boy would come down here and play pretty badly.
I plan, if and when I run into him, to ask the old Lincoln how he knew this, whether it was because he knew he would not be receiving the same kind of service he was used to at Sunderland, or wherever, or whether, for whatever reason, he would not have the matching level of commitment, or whatever, Kenwyn, from all reports, not being able to dazzle here as he did over there, the foreign-based players, from what I have seen, seldom able to replicate their club form, such as it is, on the national team.
But while, as I said I can hardly claim to be a reader of the game in the way that Shaka Hislop is in football and Ato Boldon is in athletics, I does pick up vibes and, early on in the now short-circuited campaign, I found myself unable to make the emotional investment that had been my wont since the dribbling days of "Gally'' Cummings, Steve David and Warren Archibald, the name which Haitians (Archibol!) the late, still very much lamented Lloyd Best, used to tell me evoked, as they looked (with shame!) into visiting Trinidadian eyes, Papa Doc and his lot having denied us what should have been our first time World Cup sally.
It may well be that my mood had been darkened by the sequel to that German first time with Mr Warner not willing to pay the breakthroughers and all, all my dreams of an unbroken line of football progress from then to now put paid to early, so that my new hope is that this loss will do what that victory didn't-force us to sit back, even as we are forced, World Cup-wise to lie low, and focus on the state of our football game from the community level (how can you have top-of-the-line professionals if you don't have exciting amateurs?) to the commercial.
So, it is in this context and in this vein that I asked my football "friends'', in both the narrow and wider meaning of the word, not to let their hearts be overly troubled. They can't take from us the achievement of having been the smallest country ever to make a World Cup finals and, having done that, there is no telling what else we can't do, all the other necessary things being equal-pointed post-mortem, democratic discussion, rational planning, just to name but three.
One dream has ended and another begins and, as a man for whom the football has always been part of the fete, my new dream is to be there in the Maracana Stadium or wherever, tens of thousands of us-Trinis, Brazilians, Englishmen, Spaniards, Nigerians, Italians tout monde, lustily singing:
"Soca in she samba, samba in she soca,'' or some such soccer word variation to that winning 1986 Road March beat. Man, already, Ah could hear it and feel the football feeling!
Pim-pih-lim-pin....