Alvin?Corneal

The of­fi­cial ap­pear­ance of the So­ca War­riors new­ly-ap­point­ed head coach Den­nis Lawrence and his as­sis­tant, Eng­lish­man Sol Camp­bell, now hold the reins of au­thor­i­ty over the na­tion­al Foot­ball team.

Af­ter the poor start to the Con­ca­caf Hex tour­na­ment, the coun­try has been faced with many con­fus­ing states of which coach will be able to bring the team back on vic­to­ry road and raise our hopes of qual­i­fy­ing for the Rus­sia 2018 FI­FA World Cup.

Sup­port for Den­nis, a home­town boy, whose goal against Bahrain in 2005 took us to a his­toric ap­pear­ance at the 2006 World Cup in Ger­many, will con­tribute to the team's over­all suc­cess, and I am call­ing on all of T&T to sup­port.

This mem­o­rable achieve­ment brought many of our play­ers in­to the pro­fes­sion­al are­na, main­ly in the Unit­ed King­dom, and Den­nis grabbed the chance to join Wrex­ham to start a ca­reer which carved his path to­wards the ranks of pro­fes­sion­al­ism as play­er and as­sis­tant coach up to this day.

Even if he had not set the world afire in the Pre­mier League in Eng­land, his per­for­mances in the cham­pi­onship di­vi­sion brought him re­spect from the coach­es who guid­ed his des­tiny.

He has ven­tured in­to a very new ex­pe­ri­ence as a head coach of our na­tion­al team, a chal­lenge which is vast­ly dif­fer­ent from club ac­tiv­i­ty and cer­tain­ly as the head hon­cho, where every de­ci­sion is graced by his fi­nal word in terms of team se­lec­tion, play­er's be­hav­iour, man­age­ment re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. He will al­so have to ad­min­is­ter the sideshows which are part of every na­tion­al team.

It is my sin­cere hope that his con­tract is clear­ly de­fined in terms of ref­er­ence which cov­ers ar­eas like salaries, length of con­tract, pic­ture clear un­der­stand­ing among team man­ag­er, med­ical staff, and stake­hold­ers who may be at­tached in some in­di­rect way.

His first ma­jor meet­ing with the tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee is vi­tal, if on­ly be­cause he can make his path per­fect­ly clear as to his train­ing pro­gramme, the or­gan­i­sa­tion of friend­lies lead­ing up to the of­fi­cial match­es, writ­ten com­mit­ment re­gard­ing the over­seas based play­ers and their clubs with re­spect to avail­abil­i­ty, and most of all his re­quest for com­plete con­trol over his play­ers, and def­i­nite­ly no in­ter­fer­ence from non-re­lat­ed per­son­nel.

Den­nis' re­quest for Sol Camp­bell must have come from their re­la­tion­ship dur­ing both his play­ing ca­reer while in Eng­land. The for­mer Eng­land Cen­tral de­fend­er, whose part­ner­ship with Rio Fer­di­nand stood out dur­ing the FI­FA South Ko­rea World Cup fi­nal, will be a great as­set to the team and to the play­ers hav­ing achieved at the high­est lev­el in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. He may well in­form our peo­ple as to his in­ex­pe­ri­ence as a coach, in prob­a­bly the same way that his in­spi­ra­tional strength when deal­ing with play­ers will have brought to his fel­low play­ers.

Now we must await their du­ties as the coach­ing staff of our na­tion­al se­nior team.

I will ad­mit that the in­vi­ta­tion to have at least one lo­cal as­sis­tant will have been ide­al, if on­ly for the in­for­ma­tion which could be shared about the lo­cal play­ers.

Here is a good luck wish for Den­nis Lawrence and our na­tion­al team.