?Rus­sell Lat­apy will lead a squad of home-based play­ers on­to the train­ing pitch at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo this af­ter­noon as the fi­nal stretch of prepa­ra­tions com­mence for next Wednes­day's 2010 World Cup Qual­i­fi­er against El Sal­vador. Lat­apy re­vealed yes­ter­day that he will not an­nounce his fi­nal squad un­til lat­er in the week in­clud­ing his quo­ta of over­seas-based play­ers for the all im­por­tant clash with the Cen­tral Amer­i­cans.

"I don't think it's ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary for us to re­veal too much at this time. But I have a fair idea of what the squad will be but every play­er will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to vie for se­lec­tion," Lat­apy said. "It's a cru­cial match for us and with it be­ing a mid-week game it means that we don't have much time to­geth­er with the fi­nal squad. In say­ing that, it means al­so that this will be a very cru­cial week for us ahead of the match it­self." To­day, Lat­apy will take a look at his lo­cal-based in­vi­tees in a train­ing ex­er­cise against the Na­tion­al Un­der-20 team from 5 pm.

Mean­time, San Jose Earth­quakes mid­field­er Ar­turo Al­varez stat­ed that he is "95 to 96 per cent sure" he will be called up by the El Sal­vador na­tion­al team for a World Cup qual­i­fi­er against T&T on Au­gust 12 mak­ing the Hous­ton na­tive's re-de­c­la­ra­tion of na­tion­al team al­le­giance of­fi­cial. The El Sal­vador man­age­ment has al­so in­di­cat­ed a strong pos­si­bil­i­ty of Al­varez com­ing to Port-of-Spain with the team. The 24-year-old Al­varez drift­ed out of the US na­tion­al team pic­ture since he last played for the Un­der-23 team in 2007. Since be­ing shut out, he de­ter­mined the best chance he would have to con­tin­ue his in­ter­na­tion­al ca­reer was to seek el­i­gi­bil­i­ty to play for El Sal­vador, his par­ents' birth coun­try.

Fi­fa's new el­i­gi­bil­i­ty rules, passed in June, re­laxed the re­stric­tions on such changes. Be­cause Al­varez nev­er played in an of­fi­cial match for the se­nior US na­tion­al team, he be­came el­i­gi­ble to make the switch. El Sal­vador has been shut out twice in the Hexag­o­nal and cer­tain­ly could make use of Al­varez, who has scored 21 goals and logged 17 as­sists over a sev­en-year ca­reer in Ma­jor League Soc­cer (MLS). Sal­vado­ran na­tion­al team cap­tain Ram�n S�nchez, Al­varez's team­mate on the Earth­quakes, said last week that Al­varez would be able to help the team im­me­di­ate­ly and should see play­ing time in his first game.