T&T's Under-20 men’s football team will look for its second consecutive victory in the CONCACAF U-20 Men’s Championship and World Cup qualifiers when they take on Puerto Rico today at 3 pm at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, USA.
On Thursday, T&T came from two goals down to edge regional neighbours St Vincent and the Grenadines 3-2, courtesy goals by Jayden Prowell, substitute Mark Ramdeen and Judah Garcia. The Puerto Ricans though were not so lucky, going down in a heavy 1-7 thrashing by the United States.
National coach Russell Latapy will have his full complement of players for today's encounter after Portuguese-based midfielder Che Benny joined the team camp on Thursday night. Latapy had his first training session with the full squad at 2 pm yesterday, as matches in the other groups continued.
“We’re pleased to finally have everyone together. It’s always good to get in a solid session and of course we’ll go after our next opponents looking to build on what we have coming out of the first game,” Latapy said.
John Paul Rochford, who started the tournament as team captain, said he was grateful for the opening win but not particularly pleased with the level of the performance against “Vincey Heat”.
“I’m grateful for the fact that the boys dug deep and we came out with the victory in the end. We fought hard for 90 minutes straight until the end, and it happened that we scored two goals in one minute and I thank God for that. I thank the players for fighting for the win,” said Rochford, a Queen's Royal College (QRC) standout midfielder.
“The turning point was when the players realised we had little time and everything was on the line. We are in a position where we are fighting for ourselves and fighting to make the country proud, as proud as we can make them.
“We spoke to ourselves and said we had to win don’t matter the situation.”
The former Santa Rosa FC and current Portland Timbers player believed the win also came because the players took the coach's instruction.
“He just told us that we needed to fight a little more. We needed to stick to the plan, we needed to listen and follow the instructions and once we did that everything would fall into place. We followed the instructions for the first goal. We did what he advised us to do and it worked, so we realized that once we followed his instructions, we would get the desired result. We fought ‘till the end and got the desired result," Rochford added.
The Puerto Ricans on the other hand, are expected to come hard for today's match in a bid to rebound from Thursday's loss. Some of the other results in the 34-nation tournament over the past two days include a 7-1 win for Honduras over the Dominican Republic: Guatemala defeating Guyana 4-0: Cuba 6-1 over Belize: Haiti 1-0 over St Lucia and Costa Rica defeating Bermuda 5-0.