Killing me loudly with their football

For this post I had to take a couple of days for the gripe of that loss to sink in. after a dramatically improved showing against Costa Rica on Saturday, the Soca Warriors left and went to Mexico with most people, my self included, expecting the same sort of showing if not better against a struggling El Tri. Apart from the obvious home advantage and the altitude problems of the stadium in Mexico City, I still held the faith that once the guys went out there with the aim of playing football and not conceding to Mexico’s apparent dominance they would be ok.

In reality, all our coaches have played against bigger teams very cautiously with the end result usually being that the team gets played all over and the end result not going in our favour. One of my major gripes about this method of thinking, especially in our current state, is that the ‘bigger’ teams are allowed to play to their strengths and we aren’t allowed to equally test our ‘strengths’ against them. Case in point, on Saturday 6th June 2009, the Soca Warriors played Costa Rica, and they played most of the game fearlessly. They matched every punch, every tackle in the midfield, and as I said in a previous post, dominated the midfield for most of the game. This sort of tenacity and longing for 3 points made the difference in that game. Even though they lost, there was a clearly visible change in the attitude of the players and of the fans. So when I see a line up like that fielded on Wednesday, I was appalled. We forgot about utilizing our attacking strengths and reverted to Trinidadian football of old, conservative defensive play.

The result of their defensive outlook was a goal in the first 3 minutes of play; the midfield looked clearly out of their league and our lone striker too isolated to really pose any threat. Again, I applaud Latapy for his willingness to give the young players a chance, but as was seen in that match he has a long way to go to become tactically sound. His blind reliance on an aged Yorke to lead the team can be more of a hindrance than a help. Cuauhtémoc Blanco, Yorke’s junior by one year showed us that even though he is not anywhere close to his peak, that he clearly still has what it takes to play at this level. He ran circles around not only Yorke, but the entire Trinidad and Tobago defense. He was a constant threat not because of his superior speed or ball control, but because they made it easy for him by not putting him on his back foot. The best defense is offense.

In conclusion, I think I have reached my limit of seeing Trinidad play negative football. When you are last in your group on 2 points and you are playing against a team on 3 points, damage control doesn’t entail allowing the opposition to keep the ball and do whatever they want for 90 minutes. Damage control should be run at the opposition, see if you can rattle them enough for them to make a mistake and capitalize, THEN you can consider playing defensively. We tried the defensive thing in the world cup and personally I was ashamed of our displays. We are a country with a plethora of attacking talent. Our defenses have never been great. We need to maximize on our strengths and stop playing to our weaknesses.

Honourable mention goes to Tinto, for making history, becoming the first Trini to score against Mexico. Abu Bakr did well in the defense, for a young player making his debut and being thrown into this climate. This is extremely hard to do even for seasoned players. Kenwyne Jones was too isolated to prove my thoughts of him wrong. Yorke and Andrews should retire, seriously. But yet again, we’ll have to wait and see how things unfold for this team. I must really love this team, because watching this team play is as painless as a circumcision.