T&T's Coach Faces Up To Bermuda Loss

• Trinidad & Tobago Express, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 1:45 PM

The inquiries continue into Trinidad & Tobago's astonishing 2-1 home defeat to Bermuda Sunday in the second round of Concacaf World Cup qualifying. T&T's Colombian coach, Francisco Maturana, took the full blame at the post-game press conference, saying via a translator that his team "abused long passes," and that this was no way to play the game. Perhaps they took too many soccer lessons from playing England two weeks earlier.
 
Maturana speaks little English, but "that might be his sole comfort" in Tuesday's postmortem with Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation special adviser Jack Warner, quips Lasana Liburd. After all, his side has just lost to "a Bermudan team whose defensive spine had the average age of 32, and whose rotund mid-sections bore more resemblance to an all fours team than an athletic outfit."
 
The coach gambled by switching from the team's favored 4-4-2 system "to a relatively untried 3-5-2," writes Liburd. "There is inevitably the hint of desperation when a team prepares for five months in one formation only to change a week before the first examination." Young players who had been tried out have already been discarded in favor of the senior, more experienced players, but those players will need "to hit the right notes in Bermuda" this coming weekend to overcome the deficit in the second leg.

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