Nicholas Clarke

New­ly-ap­point­ed head coach of the So­ca War­riors, Ot­to Pfis­ter, has pledged to do every­thing in his pow­er to en­sure that T&T qual­i­fies for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The Ger­man was speak­ing dur­ing a press con­fer­ence host­ed by the T&T Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion at Crowne Plaza Ho­tel on Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day. One of Ger­many's most suc­cess­ful coach­ing ex­ports, Pfis­ter, 74, was vot­ed Africa's Man­ag­er of the Year in 1992. He has been to four African Cup of Na­tions com­pe­ti­tions with Burk­i­na Fa­so, Zaire, Cameroon and Ghana, reach­ing the fi­nal with the lat­ter two. He al­so won the Fi­fa Un­der-17 World Cup with Ghana and coached To­go at the 2006 World Cup.

Speak­ing to the lo­cal me­dia for the first time, he said he was look­ing for­ward to get­ting the most out of the na­tion­al team. "If we work to­geth­er we can achieve some­thing. We have huge chal­lenges ahead of us and I will give all my best to en­sure that T&T makes it to Brazil in three years time. I do not know why T&T did not qual­i­fy in 2010, and over the next few days I will be find­ing out what went wrong. We do not have a lot of time, but from to­day we will have to work to­geth­er and make a max­i­mum ef­fort."

Al­so speak­ing at the un­veil­ing was spe­cial ad­vi­sor to the T&T Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion and act­ing Prime Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er who re­vealed that Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar was will­ing to do what­ev­er it took to help T&T make it to their sec­ond World Cup. "Mrs Per­sad Bisses­sar has in­struct­ed the Min­is­ter of Sport Anil Roberts to come to her with a bud­get for the foot­ball team that will take us to Brazil. You will nev­er get it bet­ter than that," he said. "We will em­ploy a pro­fes­sion­al per­son who will sit down and work out all the de­tails and then we will go to her. We all saw what hap­pened when we qual­i­fied for Ger­many and the gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to fi­nanc­ing this project and do­ing every­thing in its pow­er to make this dream come true."

Warn­er added that while he had not been in­volved in the se­lec­tion process for the new coach, he was ex­treme­ly pleased with the fed­er­a­tion's de­ci­sion to sign Pfis­ter, a friend of his for over two decades. "I did ad­vise that they go for an in­ter­na­tion­al coach of re­pute, a for­eign coach of sub­stance and to make the screen­ing process as wide­spread as pos­si­ble, but I had ab­solute­ly noth­ing to do with the se­lec­tion. It was on­ly af­ter the de­ci­sion was made that I re­vealed that I had known Ot­to for over 20 years. I know of his record and achieve­ments all over the world and that he is high­ly re­spect­ed. We are for­tu­nate have this man in our set-up."