AMERICAN Randy Waldrum has urged the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association (TTFA) and THE Government to learn from past mistakes and not just let the national women’S football programme fall back into the obscurity from which it came, following the Women Warriors agonising failure to qualify for the 2015 FIFA Women’S World Cup.
The Soca Warriors lost a two-leg Inter-continental playoff 1-0 on aggregate against Ecuador for a spot in the World Cup. A highly-rated American coach of the women’s professional team Houston Dash, Waldrum donated his services for free in a bid to qualify T&T for a first appearance at a senior women’s World Cup.
As disappointed as he is, Waldrum said T&T’s women footballers had touched many hearts around the world. He called them a Cinderella team.
“We’ve developed some good momentum here and I don’t think we need to just stop and let it go,” Waldrum said. “The next step going forward to start to build on it. As disappointed as we are, it will be a shame to just let it go down and take a back seat once again. We can’t have that happen. We need to go forward.”
“I am really proud of the group, but extremely disappointed for them. Especially those older players, who have put so much into the game,” Waldrum added. “I think the future is bright. We have a lot of good upcoming talent like Anique Walker and the Debesette twins. But for those players who this might be their last opportunity, I feel very disappointed for them.”
Waldrum felt his team played well against Ecuador, whose game plan he said, was to sit and counter and take advantage of set plays. “The two areas that I am disappointed in is that as much as we had the ball, we did not create enough clear opportunities to create great shots on goal.
‘’We had a lot of services and crosses into the box, but we did not get the clear shots. The other thing, defensively, was giving up the foul late in the game. Those are things we addressed all week, that there was no need to foul a player out wide. We did and (as a result) we are not going to the World Cup.
“I think we were much better tonight that we were in Ecuador. We were much healthier than we were at CONCACAF,” Waldrum said. “We got three or four chances I thought we should have scored. We didn’t, and when you keep teams hanging around it happens."