Na­tion­al women's foot­ball coach Richard Hood is gen­er­al­ly hap­py with the ef­fort of his team, de­spite a 1-0 loss to gi­ants Mex­i­co at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo, Port-of-Spain on Tues­day night that end­ed their chances of seal­ing a place at the Con­ca­caf Women's Gold Cup.

T&T's "Women War­riors" were ham­mered 6-0 in the first meet­ing be­tween the teams in Sep­tem­ber, how­ev­er, the goal-fest that was ex­pect­ed on Tues­day night nev­er hap­pened.

The Women War­riors, in need of a clear four-goal win, were ex­pect­ed to be ul­tra of­fen­sive in the en­counter, but in­stead were forced to de­fend stout­ly against a rag­ing Mex­i­can at­tack. The re­sult meant that the Mex­i­cans topped Group A with 12 points, while the Puer­to Ri­can took the sec­ond-place qual­i­fy­ing berth with four points.

The Women War­riors re­mained on just one point in the cam­paign, hav­ing lost to the Mex­i­cans twice 6-0 and 1-0, and lost and drew with Puer­to Ri­co 2-1 and 0-0, re­spec­tive­ly. At the post-match press con­fer­ence on Tues­day, Hood ex­pressed mixed feel­ings.

"It was a big im­prove­ment and it was some­thing we have been ask­ing from the ladies, that they go out and demon­strate the progress they have made dur­ing the cam­paign. I think that every game we have im­proved and they demon­strat­ed that tremen­dous­ly last night," Hood said.

"For me, I was a bit dis­ap­point­ed in how we played from the point that we strug­gled to keep hold of the ball, we didn't re­al­ly have much pos­ses­sion and we didn't re­al­ly stretch our­selves of­fen­sive­ly. But I was very hap­py with the de­fen­sive ef­fort, the shape and the or­gan­i­sa­tion and to me, that's the big take­away. The Mex­i­cans had dif­fi­cul­ty in break­ing us down and I was re­al­ly hap­py about that."

Hood and his charges got a sur­prise vis­it from Min­is­ter of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Sham­fa Cud­joe-Lewis, who promised to lend her as­sis­tance to the women's pro­gramme. This pro­gramme lacked over­all sup­port up to the point where play­ers were not com­mit­ted to the prepa­ra­tion of Tues­day's match.

"Be­fore I made my post-match com­ments to the girls, the Min­is­ter of Sports came to greet them and I told her that what we need mov­ing for­ward is in­vest­ment in the women's pro­gramme and she promised a cer­tain amount of equip­ment to as­sist the pro­gramme. So we look for­ward to that," said Hood.

"We have to con­tin­ue, we have to keep train­ing, we have to keep build­ing the lo­cal pool, we have to keep build­ing the lo­cal pro­gramme. I said to them, it must nev­er be a po­si­tion where we turn to what we met when we came in­to this pro­gramme in Ju­ly. For me, we want to take a bit of a break for Christ­mas and we're go­ing to have meet­ings with the tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor the di­rec­tor of women's foot­ball and the gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion to plan the way for­ward.

"I would want to get the play­ers back on to the pitch as ear­ly as Jan­u­ary and re­al­ly what we need to do now is to play as many in­ter­na­tion­al games as pos­si­ble every FI­FA win­dow. We can start small, against our Caribbean neigh­bours. We saw St Vin­cent and Bar­ba­dos played last night. These are the teams we need to start build­ing the pro­gramme against, and learn how to win games, rather than we go up against tougher op­po­si­tion like Mex­i­co, of which we are nowhere close to that kind of qual­i­ty to face that kind of op­po­si­tion.

"It's about re­build­ing the pro­gramme and con­tin­u­ing to re­build the pro­gramme."

He sees promise for the team's fu­ture, say­ing: "Last evening, we saw two 16-year-olds take to the pitch and I thought they did re­al­ly well. That's the way we're look­ing to go, ex­pose as many play­ers as pos­si­ble, get them play­ing in­ter­na­tion­al foot­ball and that's go­ing to take us back on the right track of where we want to be."

Hood was re­fer­ring to young­sters J'Eleisha Alexan­der and Orielle Mar­tin, who were in­sert­ed late in the match.