Trinidad and To­ba­go’s foot­ballers again find them­selves in the hu­mil­i­at­ing po­si­tion of pick­ing up the pieces from an­oth­er failed World Cup cam­paign—this time for the 2022 edi­tion in Qatar. The So­ca War­riors’ lat­est failed dri­ve came last week­end af­ter a woe­ful goal­less draw against the Ba­hamas, one of the re­main­ing two games they had to win to have any chance of ad­vanc­ing to the next phase.

Need­less to say, fol­low­ing yes­ter­day’s fi­nal aca­d­e­m­ic group match against St Kitts and Nevis, it would have been worth be­ing a fly on the wall to hear what coach Ter­ry Fen­wick would have told his play­ers. Then again, Fen­wick, or any coach worth their salt, should not have been in charge yes­ter­day had he re­flect­ed on what he has over­seen since his ap­point­ment last year.

Cur­rent skip­per Shel­don Bateau summed up the team’s cur­rent state of af­fairs on Mon­day when he said, “For me, I al­ways have to mo­ti­vate my­self when it comes to Trinidad foot­ball. To be hon­est, there’s so many things against us as play­ers, that men­tal­ly, phys­i­cal­ly, fi­nan­cial­ly, play­ing for the na­tion­al team takes a lot out of you. We miss fam­i­ly time, you name it. We sac­ri­fice a lot. …We have a lot to fix and I think if these things aren’t fixed it is dif­fi­cult to con­tin­ue un­der these cir­cum­stances.”

The cur­rent team lives un­der the shad­ows of speak­ing anony­mous­ly to the me­dia about the is­sues they face for fear of vic­tim­i­sa­tion, even while they are clear­ly not re­ceiv­ing good treat­ment from the TTFA. Now, this is not to say that play­ers pre­vi­ous­ly did not face sim­i­lar is­sues, but at least the likes of Dwight Yorke, Rus­sell Lat­apy, David Nakhid or Sha­ka His­lop, now an ES­PN foot­ball pun­dit who still speaks out on is­sues ail­ing lo­cal foot­ball, would let the TTFA know it was wrong and did so pub­licly.

Truth be told, there is noth­ing that now sug­gests the FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee un­der Robert Hadad has done any­thing to rec­ti­fy the is­sues left by the pre­vi­ous David John-Williams ad­min­is­tra­tion or those be­fore his, whether it be with the play­ers or those whom the TTFA is in­debt­ed to. Quite frankly, Mr Hadad’s modus operan­di does not sug­gest he and his Nor­mal­i­sa­tion team will come up with a for­mu­la to take T&T out of the morass in which it finds it­self any­time soon. His lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the me­dia is al­so not en­dear­ing him to John Pub­lic, who de­serves much bet­ter. Per­haps, FI­FA will as­sess his work short­ly and act ac­cord­ing­ly. So too should Fen­wick’s body of work be as­sessed and cor­rec­tive ac­tion tak­en, giv­en that the Con­ca­caf Gold Cup is next on T&T’s plate and more hu­mil­i­a­tion could be a like­ly out­come with even stronger foes in­volved. In any event, both men, the play­ers, lo­cal coach­es and ad­min­is­tra­tors need some se­ri­ous in­tro­spec­tion. T&T’s pub­lic, hav­ing tast­ed the 2006 Ger­many World Cup suc­cess, has long tired of ex­cus­es for why we can­not do it again. Per­haps this lat­est ig­nominy will spark the kind of re­vived in­ter­est in giv­ing the foot­balling fra­ter­ni­ty the boost­er shot it re­al­ly needs.