Ross Rus­sell has been hand­ed the po­si­tion of in­ter­im head coach of the T&T Men's Un­der-20 foot­ball team, fol­low­ing the sus­pen­sion of for­mer head coach Michael Mc­Comie, pend­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to an in­ci­dent be­tween him­self and squad mem­ber Alvin Jones. The move comes on the heels of T&T vis­it to St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, for the Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU) U-20 qual­i­fiers for the 2013 FI­FA?U-20 World Cup, be­ing held in Turkey. Mc­Comie, a for­mer TT Pro League "Coach of the Year", had been re­port­ed to the T&T Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion (T&TFF) by Jones' club W Con­nec­tion, af­ter the play­er col­lapsed af­ter al­leged­ly be­ing made by the coach to run 70 laps around the Lar­ry Gomes Sta­di­um, Ari­ma, on Fri­day. The T&TFF sub­se­quent­ly replied con­firm­ing that Mc­Comie has been sus­pend­ed pend­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Jones start­ed the prac­tice for the T&T U-20s against Cale­do­nia but was sub­sti­tut­ed with­in five min­utes, af­ter mak­ing an er­ror, which the coach was dis­pleased with.

Jones was sub­se­quent­ly made to run laps through­out the re­main­der of the first half and the en­tire sec­ond half, with added time, with­out stop­ping. He then dropped dur­ing the coach's team talk, while mem­bers of the coach­ing staff tried to re­vive him, which they even­tu­al­ly did. Rus­sell, who pre­vi­ous­ly served as the as­sis­tant and goal­keep­ing coach for the na­tion­al team is re­gard­ed as the most ex­pe­ri­enced coach on the cur­rent staff which in­cludes An­tho­ny Rougi­er and Clint Mar­celle. Rus­sell was on the U-17 na­tion­al which qual­i­fied for the 2007 FI­FA U-17 World Cup in South Ko­rea, be­fore lead­ing De­fence Force to a TT Pro League ti­tle in the 2010/2011 sea­son. The fi­nal squad for the up­com­ing CFU U-20 qual­i­fiers in St Vin­cent and the Grenadines is ex­pect­ed to be an­nounced to­day. The team will face the host, along with Guyana and Suri­name, from Wednes­day to the fol­low­ing Sun­day. The group win­ner will ad­vance to the CFU Fi­nals in Ja­maica from No­vem­ber 3 to 11. Five of the six teams from the fi­nal round of Caribbean qual­i­fy­ing will ad­vance to the Con­ca­caf cham­pi­onship in Puebla, Mex­i­co, Feb­ru­ary 18 to March 2, 2013 en route to the 2013 FI­FA Un­der 20 World Cup, in Turkey.