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Monday, July 14, 2025

T&T preps for CFU world qualifiers

by

20140626

T&T Un­der-17 head coach Shawn Coop­er is cur­rent­ly over­see­ing prepa­ra­tion of the his team's par­tic­i­pa­tion at next month's start of the Caribbean Foot­ball Union's (CFU) leg of Fi­fa Un­der-17 World Cup qual­i­fi­ca­tion.

Coop­er, who guid­ed this coun­try with­in one win from qual­i­fy­ing for the 2013 Fi­fa Un­der-17 World Cup, has a squad of 40 play­ers in train­ing which con­tin­ues next week at the Ato Boldon Sta­di­um, Cou­va. The ma­jor­i­ty of play­ers are those from the Un­der-15 na­tion­al team, which par­tic­i­pat­ed at the Tour­na­ment of the Amer­i­c­as in Cali, Colom­bia, last year. Coop­er has al­so added sev­er­al oth­er play­ers from the Youth Pro League .

"We start­ed ear­li­er this month at the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah be­cause the sta­di­ums were not avail­able but we'll back to train­ing at Ato Boldon from next week," Coop­er said.

"So far we've looked at sev­er­al play­ers from the TT Youth Pro League and we con­tin­ue to look at the avail­able tal­ent. The ma­jor­i­ty of the squad have been to­geth­er at the na­tion­al lev­el be­fore and the ex­pe­ri­ence of the last Un­der-15 team in Colom­bia should serve some good as we look ahead to the next tour­na­ment in Ju­ly," Coop­er added.

His main con­cern, how­ev­er, is the fit­ness lev­el of the play­ers.

"Tech­ni­cal­ly we are pret­ty okay but we are lack­ing phys­i­cal and tac­ti­cal aware­ness. I had hoped that these play­ers would be fit­ter at this time of the year. Foot­ball now is year round. There are some skill­ful play­ers in the mix and some good, strong de­fend­ers and mid­field­ers but we now have to get them play­ing as a unit as quick­ly as we can I think that a few more sol­id ses­sions should have us in a de­cent enough po­si­tion for the first round."

The 2015 FI­FA Un­der 17 Men's World Cup will be held in Chile. Twen­ty-four teams will take part in­clud­ing four from Con­ca­caf.

Twen­ty teams will com­pete in this first round of the qual­i­fiers with Ba­hamas host­ing Bermu­da, Mar­tinique and Puer­to Ri­co. The ad­di­tion­al top two teams in the draw, Haiti and Ja­maica, have re­ceive first round byes di­rect­ly to the fi­nal CFU round, host­ed in Haiti.

Oth­er open­ing round hosts at the group stage in­clude Guade­loupe, Do­mini­ca and Cu­ba while the CFU is set to an­nounce the hosts for the T&T group soon.

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