Anyone who knows anything about Trinidad & Tobago ('T&T' at home) would have expected the World Cup draw to provide a game against England - still thought of as 'the Mother Country' - as a matter of course. Trinidadians and Tobagonians (often shortened to 'Trinbagonians') are accustomed to the against-all-odds result turning up more often than not.
What, for example, were the chances of a nation with a population of a million producing two literature Nobel Prize winners in one decade? St Lucia-born Derek Walcott, the 1992 prize-winner, began his work in Trinidad; VS Naipaul, the 2001 laureate, distances himself from his native country in what any Caribbean would recognise as a definitively Trinidadian way.
What was the likelihood of global economic forces conspiring to deposit, over the course of 400 years, every major ethnic group, race, creed and religion into a space the size of London and leave them to work it out ?
A prudent bookie might say they were about the same as a country with half a dozen football teams in its professional league making it to the World Cup finals.
Still, the average Trini will fancy his team against David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Co. For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill and in T&T and the Caribbean, that gullibility fill is a resource.
If the T&T Pro League is almost laughably tiny, though, the party league is massive. The Notting Hill Carnival, Europe's largest street festival, was started by Trinidadian steel bandsmen pining for the urge to take their music into the streets. All over the world, the 100-plus modern street-party versions of the old pre-Lenten Christian festival of carnival are on the Trinidadian model, not the Brazilian one.
Because of their long history of violent oppression, Caribbean people have learnt to abandon their woes instantly for wild celebration, for however long they are permitted. In Trinidad, there is nothing to stop them.
Without the natural restraint of the Bajan or the quickly exhausted feeble financial reserves of the rest of the West Indies, Trinis will party until they drop. When we trip, we fall down to a snappy tune and come up with a bottle and spoon, beating out a calypso rhythm.
No one parties like a Trini, as football will discover when the first T&T goal is scored next summer. After the bloody Muslim fundamentalist uprising that failed in 1990, a nationwide curfew was imposed. Trinis were permitted to be outside only between noon and 6pm, so they headed for the bars. To this day, at all social levels, 'curfew parties' are fondly remembered.
For the whole of World Cup qualifying, the next most popular group after the T&T Football Federation was the Laventille Rhythm Section, a percussion group from Port of Spain's most deprived area. They flew to Panama and Bahrain to beat out a rhythm in support of the Soca Warriors - and the nation was up in arms when it seemed they might not be permitted to play. Jack Warner, a Fifa vice-president and the big man of Trini football, threatened to sit with the Rhythm Section and not the emir until the ban was lifted.
The great power of football is its ability to unite and it brought a T&T battered by crime together in joy. Already, because of football, Trini joy, the real joy of those who know they may lose everything in the next breath, has begun to push its way through the recent dominant Trini misery (a murder rate to rival New York; the kidnapping capital of the Caribbean). T&T may be 100-1 to win the World Cup, but they start as champions of the party.
Everyone who has touched a ball knows what happens when an athlete believes in himself. What happens when they know? The world may be shocked if T&T should score a goal against England and, amazingly, hold on and win in Nuremberg.
Any Trini in any rum shop could have told you all along it was bound to happen.