“From his very first training day, Otto Pfister is found struggling against defeat. He has gone some 130 days without playing a game.”
He is alone and in touch possibly only with his dreams. The hope he had that this small nation would possess sufficient mature and ready-to-use football talent, leaves him remembering his largest life’s struggles. The 3-0 win against the rather tidy, tame, and tender India did not prove too testy for his players.
Save Andre “Sweetness” Toussaint, Hughtun Hector, and Goalkeeper, Marvin Phillips, Pfister would have to thoroughly depend on the foreign-based players especially when we qualify (this should be a given) for the second round. Pfister’s struggles resemble Santiago’s and “the flag of permanent defeat”, of Hemingway’s famed, Old Man and the Sea.
But, like Santiago, Pfister appears to be refusing defeat at every turn. “He has resolved to sail out beyond our shores to where the biggest fish (overseas players) promise to be. “He is hoping to conquer the opposition (land the marlin), continuing to ward off all from destroying his dream.”
Despite his dream, Pfister’s age and experience, otherwise, wisdom, tells him that, “death is inevitable”. But like all true warriors, he “will nonetheless refuse to give in to its power. “The potential showdown with destiny suggests that it is possible to transcend this natural law.” Pfister and wisdom is at play with destiny!
“In fact, the very inevitability of destruction creates the terms that allow a worthy man (or beast) to transcend it. It is precisely through the effort to battle the inevitable that a man can prove himself,” and Otto is determined to do this “through the worthiness of the opponents he chooses to face.”
He finds the challenge worthy of a fight, no different than his many larger “battles” with “fish” he faced and fought, and that is why he pursues his plight profusely and painstakingly. “His admiration for the challenge and these opponents bring love and respect into an equation with death, as their destruction becomes a point of honour and bravery that confirms one’s heroic qualities.
One might characterise the equation as the working out of the statement, “Because I love you, I have to kill you,” or alternately, “beauty can only be comprehended in the moment before death, as beauty bows to destruction.”—John Keats. Pfister’s fate is inevitable, and like Santiago, “though destroyed at the end, is never defeated.”
Sadly, Otto Pfister’s “dignified” destiny leaves us with yet another uppercut to the developmental jaw of our players and programme, one that we never seem to be able to resolve. Pfister came here as a declared hit-man, no less than Edward Fox in the Day of the Jackal—to do what is needed to qualify us... to “kill the marlin,” and conquer the top CONCACAF foes. However, the outcome is inevitable and it leads to same doors and rooms in the pathway to the future—nowhere! It continues to a doom-filled chamber of directionless molecules floating around.
He is subtracting significant amounts from the development of those that he has been “mentoring” for the past several months and who he categorically considers competitively unsuited and unripe.
After all, he did say that he was here only to qualify T&T for Brazil 2014. But, as with Santiago, he is reminded that his fate with destiny is already written, and with it, the futures of our programme and young footballers.