WAL­TER AL­IBEY

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

wal­ter.al­ibey@guardian.co.tt

So close, yet so far. The T&T foot­ball team made a heart­break­ing ex­it from the World Cup qual­i­fiers af­ter a frus­trat­ing 1-1 draw against Ja­maica at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo, Port-of-Spain. The close-to-packed crowd, an­tic­i­pat­ing a pos­i­tive re­sult, was left de­flat­ed as the tie ce­ment­ed T&T's elim­i­na­tion.

​An emo­tion­al na­tion­al coach Dwight Yorke, once con­sid­ered the 'Smil­ing As­sas­sin' due to his goal-scor­ing prowess on the field, ad­mit­ted the re­sult cut deep. At the post-match press con­fer­ence, Yorke stat­ed the World Cup cam­paign had "not been fair" to his team.

​The tie pushed T&T to six points, leav­ing them un­able to fin­ish sec­ond in the group. Ja­maica se­cured the sec­ond spot with 10 points, while Cu­ra­cao surged to the top with 11 points af­ter a mas­sive 7-0 vic­to­ry over Bermu­da.

​“We are hurt­ing be­cause we’ve giv­en every­thing. We’ve dom­i­nat­ed Ja­maica in every sense; the stats do not lie. I’m sure that if you’re look­ing back, it’s just a fine line. When you’ve played the way we played, and giv­en what we’ve giv­en through­out the cam­paign, par­tic­u­lar­ly tonight, I think this is our best per­for­mance. Ja­maica had one shot on tar­get and were able to score; we had 17. We had 62 per­cent dom­i­nance: 362 com­pared to 251 pos­ses­sions. We have dom­i­nat­ed them in every as­pect of the game, and un­for­tu­nate­ly, stats do not win you games. When you play the way we have played, with the en­er­gy, the pas­sion, and con­trol through­out the game," Yorke said.

​De­spite the pain, Yorke ex­pressed pride in his play­ers' ex­e­cu­tion of the game plan, es­pe­cial­ly af­ter go­ing down a goal.

​“We had a strat­e­gy in place if we had gone be­hind, which we did, and to see how we re­vert­ed, and the play­ers that I’ve tak­en on board what they did for us to score from a strat­e­gy of go­ing to three in the back and push­ing the two full-backs up... and al­so see­ing the wingers in­to a more at­tack­ing and ad­vanced po­si­tion. So, when you see those plans are work­ing, and cre­at­ing and scor­ing from it, as a coach, you take a lot of pride from that, but yes, it’s still not what we want­ed.

​"It’s been that sort of cam­paign for us, where we dom­i­nat­ed teams, but some­how, we came up a lit­tle short. But it’s very en­cour­ag­ing; as a coach, you’ve got to be hap­py. It felt like a de­feat; it felt like a dig in the stom­ach. It’s not easy to swal­low that when you know you’ve dom­i­nat­ed teams like Ja­maica."

With one game re­main­ing, Yorke stressed the need to re­cov­er quick­ly and fin­ish the cam­paign strong­ly.

"We’ve got to dust our­selves off be­cause that’s the na­ture of sports. Some­times you don't get the re­sults that you de­serve, and tonight (Thurs­day) was an in­di­ca­tion of that. How­ev­er, we’ve got an­oth­er game on Tues­day, we’ll eval­u­ate the game, we’ll talk about it, we cer­tain­ly have a cou­ple more days to pre­pare.......and the play­ers will be up for Bermu­da, be­cause we want to fin­ish the cam­paign on a high, con­tin­ue that un­beat­en run at home. Foot­ball has a way that some­times, it’s not re­al­ly fair, and we felt that this cam­paign has not re­al­ly been fair to us,” Yorke said.

He un­der­scored his point by de­liv­er­ing sta­tis­tics from the match and oth­er games to show their mis­for­tune, say­ing: "I can tell you that we’re dis­ap­point­ed with the re­sults, but I can't tell you how proud I am about these play­ers, what they’ve giv­en over the past year since I have tak­en this job. It’s hard to think that we are not where we want to be be­cause of the points sys­tem."

​"But in terms of per­for­mance-wise, these play­ers have giv­en every­thing. When you look over­all, the stats ac­tu­al­ly sug­gest the dom­i­nance we had: 62 per­cent pos­ses­sion, 17 chances at goal, three big chances to­day, and one big op­por­tu­ni­ty at goal. Those num­bers, 362 pass­es to­day to 251, so we looked at the stats to­day, and of course, stats do not win you foot­ball match­es, but it’s just a fine line."

“We haven’t been able to close the games off, but in terms of foot­ball, any­one who watched T&T play foot­ball, cer­tain­ly from the time I’ve tak­en the job to where we are, you’ve got to be proud of these guys. They’ve left every­thing out there; they’ve giv­en every­thing. The fans, the peo­ple of T&T, came out in their num­bers to sup­port the team. We just came up a lit­tle bit short, but I’m over the moon by the team’s per­for­mance and what we’ve been able to do at this point.”