Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) will feature in Monday night’s draw for the preliminaries of the CONCACAF Gold Cup despite being slapped with an unlimited suspension by football’s world governing body, FIFA on Thursday, T&T Republic Day, with immediate effect and until further notice.
The ruling means that T&T cannot participate in any FIFA tournaments, events or programmes anywhere in the world until the suspension is lifted.
T&T was looking forward to participating in next year's Gold Cup tournament in the United States and the upcoming World Cup qualifiers in March 2021.
The sanction follows a decision by the former TTFA executive headed by elected president William Wallace and vice presidents — Clynt Taylor, Susan Joseph-Warrick (resigned on Friday) and Joseph Sam Phillips decision to challenge FIFA's decision to remove from office and replace them with a Normalisation Committee, in the T&T court instead to of Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland, which FIFA said, "the TTFA committed “grave violations of the FIFA Statutes."
However, FIFA's Council's decision was followed by an emergency meeting of CONCACAF’s council late Thursday night, and a decision was made to offer T&T a ray of hope of still competing in the confederation showpiece but it must have the suspension revoked by FIFA by December 18 or Antigua and Barbuda will replace them in the 12-team tournament scheduled for next July, continental governing body CONCACAF announced Friday.
“For the purposes of the 2021 Gold Cup draw which takes place tonight at 8:00 pm (TT Time), Trinidad and Tobago will be drawn in the Prelims as planned. However, they will only participate in the competition if the suspension imposed on the TTFA is lifted by FIFA by 5:00 pm ET on December 18, 2020,” the CONCACAF statement said.
According to the FIFA's release on Thursday, the suspension will only to be lifted if the TTFA recognise and accept the Normalisation Committee and if the TTFA statutes are in line with FIFA statutes.
“If the suspension imposed on the TTFA is not lifted by FIFA by 5:00 pm ET on December 18, 2020, Trinidad and Tobago will be replaced in the Gold Cup Prelims by the Antigua and Barbuda Football Association as the next highest-ranked team based on their 2019 Concacaf Nations League performance,” the Concacaf said.
However, on Friday, Wallace responded with a letter that said: “It is also now clear that the decision to suspend the TTFA amidst the upcoming draw for the Gold Cup 2021 is meant to, amongst other things, provoke public furore against the properly and democratically elected executive of the TTFA. It is, for this reason, that last night (Thursday) I gave instructions to the TTFA Attorneys to file an emergency appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), challenging the sole issue of the suspension of TTFA in the face of illegal threats and coercive acts by FIFA. The attorneys were also asked to make an application for Injunctive Relief so that if successful this would allow T&T to participate in the Gold Cup draw carded for Monday 28th September 2020.”
The T&T Football Association had provoked FIFA’s ire by taking them to court over their decision to remove the William Wallace-led administration and install a normalisation committee last March.
And the stand-off reached crisis stage last month when the Trinidad and Tobago high court judge Carol Gobin ruled against FIFA on August 13, saying that the dispute between them and the former TTFA executives could be heard in the local jurisdiction instead of the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, as contended by the world governing body.
FIFA subsequently warned the local FA their court action had “greatly [endangered] the overall football structure in the country and [endangered] the position of Trinidad and Tobago football internationally and set September 16 as a deadline to withdraw the matter from the local courts. The TTFA missed that deadline and on September 18 another deadline was set as September 23 by 3:00 pm for which the TTFA also missed.
T&T ranked 93rd in the FIFA rankings and is among 12 teams including the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Montserrat and St Vincent and the Grenadines, expected to do battle for the last three spots in the 16-team group stage of the Gold Cup.
T&T qualified for the preliminaries as the third-place finishers in Group C of League A when they failed to win any of their two matches.
TTFA has been in a tussle with the FIFA since March 17, when its elected executive was removed and ten days later replaced by a FIFA-appointment Normalisation Committee as the administrators of local football.