As Trinidad & Tobago announce their World cup squad, our correspondent finds Caribbean contrasts.
ONE evening last week, a young man walking near Morvant in the hills above Port of Spain was shot dead for no apparent reason. It was the 113th killing in 95 days in Trinidad and Tobago.
It is not the kind of image that most people have of the twin Caribbean islands. Trinidad is supposed to be about carnival, calypso and cricket; Tobago conjures visions of white sand beaches and rainforests.
So what has all this got to do with football? Simply that Trinidad & Tobago — or the Soca Warriors, as they are known — believe that their achievement in becoming the smallest nation to qualify for the World Cup finals can restore some dignity to a society being torn apart by drugs and guns.
It was hard to believe that such a sinister undercurrent existed on the November day that the Warriors — ranked 49th in the world — booked themselves a place in Germany. Within minutes of the final whistle of their play-off against Bahrain, thousands of people streamed on to the streets to celebrate. Drivers stopped to embrace one another, flags were waved, steel bands paraded and shopkeepers handed out fabric in the national colours, making the roads rivers of red, white and black.
When the players got home, so many people lined the highway from the airport to Port of Spain that a 30-minute drive to the capital took more than six hours. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Allyson Hennessy, who owns the Veni Mange restaurant where Brian Lara, the cricket legend, and Dwight Yorke, the captain of the football side, chill out when they are at home together, said. “I saw Brian’s homecoming after he made his record scores, but the reception the footballers got was different altogether. It was chaos, but the most enjoyable chaos you have seen.”
The ensuing chaos has not been as enjoyable. Jack Warner, a Trinidad businessman, a vice-president of Fifa and adviser to the Trinidad & Tobago Football Federation (TTFF), was embroiled in controversy when a local journalist was banned from covering the finals after alleging that he had used his position to establish a monopoly over ticket allocations. The journalist was subsequently granted accreditation but Warner was cleared of any wrongdoing. The Government has also been accused of dragging its feet over promised bonuses to the players and failing to support sending a cultural contingent to Germany to “heighten awareness of the country”.
The footballers themselves can remain detached from the excitement. Apart from the handful who play in the professional league here, they went back to their clubs — Yorke to Sydney FC, Shaka Hislop to West Ham United and others to lower divisions in England and the United States.
Leo Beenhakker, the 62-year-old coach, believes that anything is possible for a team who were bottom of their qualifying group when he took over last April. The Dutchman, who had coached Holland and won national titles with Real Madrid, Ajax and Feyenoord, knew what had to be done. “The problem in the ‘small’ countries is playing as a team,” he said, “so we tried to establish organisation among the players. And we changed the offensive philosophy — everyone wanted to attack.
“The general consensus is that the main thing is to beat England. After our qualification, we had three months of carnival. If we don’t lose against England, we could well have carnival for a year.”
Anton Corneal, one of his assistants, said that the nation expected to do well. “We see the England players on television every week, we know a lot about Sweden and have done well before against Paraguay,” he said.
In May, before they head to Germany, they will play a final home game against Peru, when 24,000 fans will cheer their Warriors on their way.
Up in Morvant, which happens to be where Dennis Lawrence, scorer of the goal that took the team to the finals, comes from, the killing goes on. “It’s filled with crime,” Shaun Fuentes, the T & TFF communications officer, said. “All the players hope that people who don’t have it easy will think about where Dennis came from, and where he is now, and realise that they can achieve something in their lives.”