Nigel Si­mon

For­mer cap­tain of the So­ca Princess­es, util­i­ty play­er Na­dia James has been forced out of the se­nior na­tion­al women's team for the up­com­ing Con­ca­caf Women's World Cup qual­i­fy­ing tour­na­ment in Mex­i­co due to school com­mit­ments. Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, na­tion­al women's team coach Ja­maal Shabazz who will name his fi­nal squad on Mon­day ahead of Tues­day's de­par­ture for Mex­i­co, said James, a stu­dent at West Texas Uni­ver­si­ty and a main stay in the mid­field will not be join­ing the team. Un­cer­tain­ty al­so hangs over the avail­abil­i­ty of speedy for­ward, Ah­keela Mol­lon, who is based in Swe­den. "We will know by to­mor­row if Mol­lon will be join­ing the team," added the T&T coach.

Look­ing ahead to the tour­na­ment in Can­cun, Mex­i­co where T&T will face the host coun­try, Cana­da and Guyana, Shabazz says the pos­si­bil­i­ties are there for a strong show­ing and a like­ly pas­sage through to the semi­fi­nal round. "We have the abil­i­ty to ad­vance to the last four and then from there any­thing can hap­pen with re­gards to qual­i­fi­ca­tion for the World Cup in Ger­many next year," Shabazz said. The So­ca Princess­es squad just back from a two-match warm up of Guatemala where it en­joyed a 3-2 win and 2-2 draw with the host will open its qual­i­fy­ing cam­paign against Cana­da on Fri­day.

T&T Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion Di­rec­tor of Women's foot­ball and for­mer Cana­di­an coach Even Pellerud will al­so meet with Shabazz pri­or to the team's de­par­ture to dis­cuss the team's prepa­ra­tions for that en­counter.

T&T will al­so meet Mex­i­co on Oc­to­ber 31 and Guyana on No­vem­ber 2. The top two teams will ad­vance to the semi­fi­nals with the fi­nal­ists qual­i­fy­ing for Ger­many 2011 next June and the third place win­ner mov­ing on to a play­off with Eu­rope's fifth place fin­ish­er. "Pellerud knows Cana­da's foot­ball and he has seen their team play this year and so we will sit down and hold ex­ten­sive dis­cus­sions in re­la­tion to that match and oth­er rel­e­vant mat­ters," Shabazz said. Re­flect­ing on the match­es against Guatemala, Shabazz said de­spite the dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances with as much as eight play­ers be­ing un­avail­able due to ill­ness, the team demon­strat­ed a strong sense of char­ac­ter. Shabazz added: "I think the pres­sure that we un­der­went in Guatemala was a bless­ing be­cause it turned out to be much tougher than we ex­pect­ed with the eight play­ers hav­ing to miss the match­es.

This forced the play­ers to dig deep and we as coach­es had to think out­side the box. These are all nec­es­sary el­e­ments re­quired for us to suc­ceed at the Con­ca­caf qual­i­fi­ca­tion lev­el." "Now that we are back home, we will fo­cus on fine tun­ing and hope­ful­ly leave in time next week to have a cou­ple ses­sions with the over­seas-based play­ers be­fore the Cana­da match. We are fo­cus­ing on a cou­ple par­tic­u­lar ar­eas with re­gards to killing teams off as we should have in the sec­ond game against Guatemala. We were two goals ahead and we sat back and al­lowed them to come back in­to the game and we al­most lost the match near the end. We will not have that lux­u­ry in Con­ca­caf where we can squan­der a two-goal lead and still sur­vive or go on to win a match," Shabazz added.