Dis­ap­point­ed and hurt sum up the way na­tion­al foot­ball coach Den­nis Lawrence feels fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup cam­paign in the Unit­ed States re­cent­ly, but he in­sist­ed Wednes­day that the re­sults are a con­se­quence of the non-func­tion­al T&T Pro League.

At a press con­fer­ence at the Na­tion­al Cy­cling Cen­tre (NCC) in Bal­main, Cou­va, Lawrence said the team faced nu­mer­ous chal­lenges go­ing in­to the tour­na­ment, rang­ing from visa is­sues, a mix-up in the Cana­da friend­ly match which re­sult­ed in in­juries for some of the play­ers be­fore the start of the Gold Cup, poor at­ti­tude by play­ers and a goal-scor­ing prob­lem.

And with the CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League set to kick off in Sep­tem­ber, the T&T coach ad­mit­ted he will be mak­ing a num­ber of changes to his squad, which will in­clude call-ups to new lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al play­ers, while at­tempts will al­so be made to se­cure in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly match­es against our re­gion­al neigh­bours.

At this year's Gold Cup, the T&T team was beat­en 0-2 in its open­ing match to Pana­ma be­fore a 0-6 rout by the Unit­ed States, which sparked calls for Lawrence to step down as coach. The So­ca War­riors then fin­ished Group D with an­oth­er dis­ap­point­ing 1-1 tie with Guyana.

Lawrence, a for­mer na­tion­al de­fend­er, said he called the press con­fer­ence be­cause he want­ed to give the me­dia the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­dress its con­cerns to him and not any­one else.

"Foot­ball is a very un­pre­dictable game. If we had man­aged to put in the per­for­mances we did against Thai­land, Iran, Japan, Wales, then prob­a­bly we would have gone fur­ther, but foot­ball is not like that when you go in­to a tour­na­ment. When you go in­to a tour­na­ment, you have to look at it in two ways, do you want to go and sur­vive, or do you want to com­pete and win the tour­na­ment."

He added, "When we went in­to the tour­na­ment, we un­der­stood that one of the biggest chal­lenges we had was that we were not scor­ing goals and we weren't cre­at­ing enough chances. So by hav­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­tro­duce play­ers like Kevin Moli­no back in­to the fold, it gave us a dif­fer­ent di­men­sion. It al­lowed us more to be on the cre­ative side."

Lawrence said ide­al­ly he would have liked to have a core group of lo­cal play­ers to make up his team, but that broke down with the is­sue of fi­nance which the Pro League has been suf­fer­ing with for the longest while.

In draw­ing ref­er­ence to this, he said: "I was still in Trinidad in the year of 1999 when the Pro League came in­to ex­is­tence. Our core base for the na­tion­al team was a lot of lo­cal play­ers like An­gus Eve, Lyn­don An­drews, Stoke­ly Ma­son, Shur­land David and my­self. And dur­ing that pe­ri­od, we man­aged to do some good things. At one point we were ranked 25th on the FI­FA rank­ings and we won Caribbean Cups at that time, so we saw the ben­e­fits of the Pro League."

He added, "We go to 2016 when the gov­ern­ment's sub­ven­tion was pulled and we saw the league start­ing to strug­gle, the league be­came short­er and I as­sessed it and looked at all our re­sults from 2016 to now. So 2016, no sub­ven­tion, clubs in prob­lems, salary is­sues, all these things. Re­sults start­ed to go in the op­po­site di­rec­tion. In 2017, no sub­ven­tion, short­er leagues, then we go to 2018, the same sit­u­a­tion. In my opin­ion, your na­tion­al pro­grammes are as strong as your league. We are the on­ly coun­try to take part in the Gold Cup that did not have a league."

Due to this, Lawrence said he be­lieves the coun­try's lo­cal foot­ballers are not re­ceiv­ing the amount of foot­ball they need, which is a sad re­al­i­ty of part-time foot­ballers go­ing up against pro­fes­sion­als when they play.

He, how­ev­er, dis­missed con­cerns that T&T did not have the qual­i­ty of play­ers to com­pete with their in­ter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts, say­ing what our play­ers need is to play more foot­ball.