Na­tion­al Un­der-17 foot­ball coach Stern John has cred­it­ed his play­ers for the hard work and ef­fort giv­en at the CON­CA­CAF Un­der-17 Cham­pi­onship in, Flori­da, USA de­spite be­ing boot­ed out af­ter a 4-1 loss to Hon­duras in the round of 16 on Wednes­day.

In a post-match in­ter­view, the for­mer T&T strik­er now turns coach, said he be­lieves the play­ers have left the tour­na­ment with more ex­pe­ri­ence, knowl­edge and with a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the game. As such John has called for the team to be kept to­geth­er for fu­ture tour­na­ments, as he be­lieves the play­ers were will­ing to go out there and die for the cause.

"The game was a very dif­fi­cult one for us, I think we weath­ered the storm in the first half, we got a soft penal­ty and the keep­er saved it. The game was even­ly matched in the first half but in the sec­ond half, we came out lack­ing con­cen­tra­tion. We con­ced­ed an ear­ly goal but we man­aged to get our­selves back in the game. A cou­ple of min­utes lat­er we con­ced­ed again and we nev­er got time to set­tle, as we were just chas­ing the game. But cred­it to the boys they worked their socks off, com­ing in as boys and leav­ing as men be­cause they un­der­stand how in­ter­na­tion­al foot­ball is played now, and what is ex­pect­ed of them to com­pete at this lev­el."

John be­lieves the dif­fer­ence in lifestyles be­tween our play­ers and their op­po­si­tion con­tributed tremen­dous­ly to the re­sult of the match. "It was not easy. Most of the play­ers they played against in the tour­na­ment, play with pro league teams or are as­signed to pro­fes­sion­al teams, while most of our boys play Sec­ondary School foot­ball. It's a mas­sive gap, but I thought the boys did re­al­ly well and they should be proud."

The T&T team had just a month to pre­pare un­der John af­ter the pre­vi­ous coach Rus­sell Lat­apy with­held his ser­vices be­cause of un­paid wages. How­ev­er, John and his staff which in­clud­ed Ken­wyne Jones, the for­mer T&T strik­er, agreed to work for free and had very lit­tle time to pre­pare the team.

Yes­ter­day John said he was hap­py with the work done in the short time they had. "In a short space of time, we did not bad in the tour­na­ment, we man­aged to qual­i­fy for the sec­ond round and we were not to­geth­er for a long time, so you can imag­ine if we were to­geth­er for a much longer time and pre­pare prop­er­ly, then the sky would have been the lim­it."

John gave the as­sur­ance he will try every­thing in his pow­er to keep the team to­geth­er, say­ing the play­ers were will­ing to die for the cause.