WAL­TER AL­IBEY

wal­ter.al­ibey@guardian.co.tt

Af­ter a lengthy pe­ri­od of no foot­ball, na­tion­al coach An­gus Eve was just hap­py that his guys got the op­por­tu­ni­ty to play.

Eve’s So­ca War­riors ex­pect­ed­ly shut out Saint Mar­tin 2-0 in an in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly en­counter at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, Mu­cu­rapo in Port-of-Spain on Sun­day, as they pre­pare for two CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League (CNL) match­es against the Ba­hamas on March 24 and then three days lat­er (March 27) against Nicaragua at the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um in Ba­co­let, To­ba­go in Group C.

Eve saw the friend­ly as a use­ful out­ing for his play­ers, con­sid­er­ing the fact that there is no func­tion­al foot­ball league tak­ing place in T&T. How­ev­er, he said, the score­line should have been dif­fer­ent.

“I thought it was a good ex­er­cise for the guys. We played a very or­gan­ised Saint Mar­tin team tonight,” said Eve. “We looked very pos­i­tive in de­fence, we got a lot of chances and I thought we could have won it by a bit more goals, but we will take the win be­cause we haven’t played for so long.”

T&T is in the sec­ond po­si­tion in that group with nine points from four match­es, one be­hind Nicaragua while the Ba­hamas is third with three points, and St Vin­cent and the Grenadines bot­tom of the ta­ble with one point. This was af­ter T&T lost to Nicaragua 2-1 in their CNL open­er be­fore win­ning their next three match­es–1-0 against Ba­hamas, and 2-0 and 4-1 over St Vin­cent and the Grenadines.

The lo­cal team needs to win the group to earn au­to­mat­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup in the Unit­ed States next year, as well as be pro­mot­ed to Group A along­side the top teams in the re­gion, where Eve be­lieves they ought to be.

Play­ing against a bat­tling Saint Mar­tin team, the So­ca War­riors squan­dered sev­er­al sim­ple chances to jump ahead, how­ev­er, they even­tu­al­ly got the open­er in the 65th when Kadeem Corbin dart­ed on­to a loose ball in­side the box be­fore hit­ting it hard and low past the Saint Mar­tin goalie for a 1-0 ad­vance.

Re­al Gill, the promis­ing T&T strik­er then sealed the win in the 86th minute, dash­ing on­to a right-side cen­tre to tuck it neat­ly past the Saint Mar­tin cus­to­di­an for the win.

“The guys haven’t played com­pet­i­tive foot­ball for a while, so all in all, it was a good ex­er­cise for us,” Eve said.

He ex­plained that every­thing that they do, and every team that he puts out on the pitch, are all geared to­wards the Na­tions League match­es in March.