Cap­tain Kevin Moli­no seems to be back to his best, and he wants to main­tain the qual­i­ty that led the De­fence Force to win the T&T Pre­mier Foot­ball League and the Con­ca­caf Caribbean Cup.

​Moli­no is adamant that they have to be the team to stop the Ja­maicans, who will be here with a chip on their shoul­ders and ea­ger­ly want­i­ng to put a smile on the faces of their peo­ple, af­ter hur­ri­cane Melis­sa left a wake of de­struc­tion in its pas­sage. The se­nior foot­ballers will take on Ja­maica on Thurs­day in a crit­i­cal, must-win en­counter at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo, Port-of-Spain, need­ing to win to re­vive their hopes of a qual­i­fy­ing berth.

T&T will al­so need to win against Bermu­da next Tues­day (No­vem­ber 18) at the same venue to take their tal­ly to 11 points and in­crease their hopes of qual­i­fy­ing at the top of the group. How­ev­er, to achieve this, it would re­quire the Bermu­dans to ei­ther draw or beat Cu­ra­cao.

​De­spite a record of a win, two drawn match­es, and a loss, Moli­no is hap­py with the per­for­mances of the team, but he made it clear they have to stop the drop-off/slow­down in the fi­nal third of the match.

​“Be­ing on the na­tion­al team for quite some time, you see a mas­sive dif­fer­ence in terms of sup­port, and in terms of the ex­pe­ri­ence that is brought to the ta­ble. When you look at the coach­ing staff, they are the most ex­pe­ri­enced in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, and al­so at the club lev­el, and they bring that to the ta­ble. And when you look at the way we play foot­ball now, the young group we have, and the way we go in­to the game, we do so with a sense of con­fi­dence, and that we know what we’re about.

​“So it turns out that the an­a­lysts have seen that we’ve been spot-on from the get-go. It’s just one or two things that have let us down — it comes from the fi­nal third, that pass or the goal, but over­all, we have been hands-on with a lot of things. The coach has been say­ing it all cam­paign that it’s gonna take a whole group for us to qual­i­fy, but un­for­tu­nate­ly, Rio Car­dines is in­jured, and Mo­lik Khan, who are mas­sive play­ers, know­ing the qual­i­ty that they bring to the team, are al­so in­jured. But it’s go­ing to take a whole group, be­cause we have play­ers to fill that gap.”

​The play­ers made an ear­li­er than usu­al ap­pear­ance for prepa­ra­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the Ma­jor League Soc­cer (MLS) has come to a close. Yorke has been qui­et­ly con­duct­ing prepa­ra­tion be­hind closed doors for the past weeks, and yes­ter­day he se­lect­ed a 26-man squad, which in­cludes new­com­er Roald Mitchell, who is a strik­er who plays for the New York New Jer­sey Red Bulls.

​Moli­no said, “We’re look­ing for­ward to this mas­sive game ahead, and the mood in camp has been good, it has been fan­tas­tic, all the guys are here. I’ve been in good form club-wise, and I just want to main­tain it in terms of for the next cou­ple of days, ab­sorb­ing what the coach­es have in store for us. It’s a short time for a game on Thurs­day, which is a big game, a must-win sit­u­a­tion, a mas­sive sit­u­a­tion for us, and we will do what­ev­er it takes, but most im­por­tant­ly, we need to fo­cus in camp and fo­cus on the short time we have to work, to­geth­er with the coach­ing staff and the play­ers to get the re­quired re­sult.”