For­mer Trinidad and To­ba­go goal­keep­er Sha­ka His­lop is of the view that head coach Dwight Yorke should con­tin­ue in his role de­spite his fail­ure to lead the team to the 2026 FI­FA World Cup.

T&T won just one of their six match­es and were elim­i­nat­ed from World Cup con­tention af­ter fin­ish­ing third in Group B be­hind win­ners Cu­ra­cao and Ja­maica.

There is wide­spread spec­u­la­tion that Yorke, who was hired by the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) last No­vem­ber and giv­en a man­date to qual­i­fy for next year’s World Cup, will be sacked.

Speak­ing on Is­ports on i95.5 FM on Sat­ur­day, His­lop, who is al­so a foot­ball an­a­lyst, said he un­der­stood why some peo­ple were call­ing for Yorke’s head.

How­ev­er, he said the team had made sig­nif­i­cant progress since Yorke took over and for that rea­son, he be­lieves he should be giv­en more time.

“I am firm­ly on the fence with this one, I re­al­ly am,” His­lop said when asked if he be­lieved the TTFA should move on from Yorke.

“I will firm­ly state that I am very bi­ased to­wards Yorke, but the truth is that he was ap­point­ed to get this team to the World Cup and ob­vi­ous­ly, we haven’t made it.

“But in time, I recog­nised the progress the team has made and I re­al­ly ap­pre­ci­ate the di­rec­tion that he con­tin­ues to take this team; so those two kind of bal­ance out each oth­er.

“Now I’d love to see Dwight con­tin­ue in his role, giv­en that progress and be giv­en the sup­port in try­ing to iden­ti­fy and de­vel­op every­thing that the team needs…but I can see both sides of the ar­gu­ment so I re­al­ly couldn’t give a de­fin­i­tive an­swer on that one, one way or an­oth­er,” he added.

Speak­ing on the team’s per­for­mance in the World Cup Qual­i­fiers, His­lop ad­mit­ted that he was dis­ap­point­ed with the re­sults.

He main­tained that T&T should have done bet­ter than they did.

“I’m dis­ap­point­ed. I was dis­ap­point­ed be­cause I felt we had a group that maybe we should have been able to nav­i­gate a lot bet­ter than we did.

“But I’m al­so en­cour­aged be­cause I feel that we are just miss­ing one or two pieces, most im­por­tant­ly, a nat­ur­al fin­ish­er,” His­lop said.

“Don’t get me wrong, in terms of our start­ing front three…I thought we had three fan­tas­tic and ex­cit­ing play­ers that re­al­ly had me on the edge of my seat, but of the three of them, none of them are nat­ur­al fin­ish­ers and at this lev­el, we missed that.”

CMC