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Thu, Mar

Williams to announce 26-man squad on Saturday.
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National Under 20 Men’s Team head coach Brian Williams will announce a 26-man squad that will travel to Colombia later this month, on a date to be confirmed,  as preparations continue for the CONCACAF Final Round of Qualification for the 2017 FIFA Under 20 Men’s World Cup.

Williams completed a ten-day training camp with a training game versus San Juan Jabloteh on Wednesday morning.

“The training camp was pretty useful at this point in our preparations. We are still finalising the squad that will travel for the next leg of the preparations later this month and I will make that announcement on Saturday,” Williams told TTFA Media.

“We utilised the recent camp to work on some specific areas of our preparations. We had players in the camp who were allowed to also represent their Pro League clubs during the same period because we saw it as a way of helping with their fitness. And at the same time we continued monitoring the overseas-based players that are eligible to represent us in the final competition,” Williams added.

T&T faces Bermuda in its opening CONCACAF qualifier at the Ricardo Saprissa Stadium on February 19th, before taking on hosts Costa Rica at the National Stadium on February 22nd and El Salvador at the same venue on February 25th.

The National Stadium and Estadio Ricardo Saprissa will both be used for the tournament, to be played in a new format consisting of a group stage, a classification phase, and the grand final.

Under the new format, designed to increase the number of meaningful, competitive matches, the top two teams from Groups A, B, and C will advance to the Classification Stage, where the Confederation’s four tickets to the World Cup at this level will be determined in round robin play among two groups of three teams each.

The top two teams of each of the two Classification Stage groups will qualify as CONCACAF representatives to the FIFA U-20 World Cup Korea Republic 2017.