To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

The fail­ure of the na­tion­al foot­ball team in the Dig­i­cel Caribbean Cup fi­nals in Mar­tinique was a clear in­di­ca­tion that all is not right with the sport here in T&T. From be­ing the num­ber one team in the Caribbean and one that was feared by all the oth­er coun­tries, T&T has now been re­duced to just an­oth­er team against which any of the oth­ers could com­pete favourably. A 1-0 vic­to­ry over Mar­tinique in their fi­nal game and two loss­es to Cu­ba (2-0) and Grena­da (1-0) ef­fec­tive­ly stymied the as­pi­ra­tions of coach Rus­sell Lat­apy's So­ca War­riors, who will now miss the Gold Cup, the pre­mier com­pe­ti­tion in the re­gion. It must be iron­ic that even be­fore the team kicked a ball, Lat­apy was talk­ing about play­ing against Ja­maica in the fi­nal. The Lit­tle Ma­gi­cian, as Lat­apy was re­ferred in his play­ing days, was over­ly con­fi­dent of not on­ly ad­vanc­ing to the se­mi-fi­nals, which guar­an­teed a place in the Gold Cup, but of meet­ing the Reg­gae Boyz in the Caribbean Cup fi­nal.

As it turned out, he was part­ly right–Ja­maica was in the fi­nal, which it even­tu­al­ly won, while T&T failed to get to the se­mi-fi­nal.

As usu­al, the dag­gers have been tak­en out and point­ed at Lat­apy and it would seem that the rea­son for the pa­thet­ic dis­play lies in his ex­clu­sive do­main. Al­ready there are re­ports he is to be fired and the fed­er­a­tion is ne­go­ti­at­ing with Jean Tigana, the for­mer French play­er and Dutch­man Ru­ud Gul­litt as pos­si­ble re­place­ments. It is a knee-jerk re­sponse that is des­tined to fail. The truth is T&T foot­ball has been in the dol­drums for a long time, some would say blight­ed by the fail­ure of the fed­er­a­tion to pro­fes­sion­al­ly deal with the play­ers who rep­re­sent­ed the coun­try with so much pas­sion and com­mit­ment at the Ger­many World Cup fi­nals in 2006. Sev­er­al of the play­ers who were he­roes on that team were lost to our foot­ball sim­ply be­cause they opt­ed to chal­lenge the fed­er­a­tion's fi­nan­cial deal­ings with them.

It there­fore came as no sur­prise, as re­vealed by this news­pa­per's ex­clu­sive sto­ry in yes­ter­day's edi­tion, that once again the fed­er­a­tion has failed to pay the play­ers' salaries for the past 13 match­es. The stark re­al­i­ty is that the days when play­ers ran on to the field sim­ply for the love of rep­re­sent­ing their coun­try is far gone. Mon­ey re­mains a po­tent mo­ti­va­tion­al tool, but more im­por­tant­ly for many of the play­ers it is es­sen­tial for tak­ing care of their fam­i­lies. Even be­fore they get to the point of rep­re­sent­ing the coun­try, there is the whole ques­tion of the role of the ad­min­is­tra­tors. Have they done every­thing pos­si­bly to help de­vel­op an en­vi­ron­ment for the suc­cess of play­ers?

Was Lat­apy ex­posed to the cut­ting edge of teach­ing/coach­ing tech­nol­o­gy so that he could de­vel­op the knowl­edge base to bet­ter pre­pare the team? Ad­min­is­tra­tors must un­der­stand they are there for the sole pur­pose of work­ing for the suc­cess of the coach­es and play­ers, and by ex­ten­sion the team.?If we look hard we will find that in the Mar­tinique fail­ure, there are lessons. Will we learn from them? Some­one must tell the na­tion why it is the pen­du­lum has swung so swift­ly. It is fol­ly to ig­nore this pa­thet­ic dis­play and hope that it will re­pair it­self. Foot­ball is not mag­ic. The an­swer lies in the plan­ning and in­tel­li­gent work by the back­room staff.

If we con­tin­u­ous­ly use the fir­ing of coach­es to treat a can­cer­ous prob­lem, we will soon be the door­mat of re­gion­al foot­ball.

Fir­ing Lat­apy is not the an­swer. The TTFF must dig deep­er and come up with re­al so­lu­tions.