De­fend­er Aubrey David is sug­gest­ing the T&T team, throw all its fo­cus on the Ba­hamas team first, ahead of what can be a qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup next year and pro­mo­tion to Group A in the CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League.

They will have to beat the Ba­hami­ans on Fri­day at the Thomas A Robin­son Na­tion­al Sta­di­um in Nas­sau to set up a show­down with Nicaragua on Mon­day at the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um in Ba­co­let, To­ba­go.

The Nicaraguans lead Group C with ten points with T&T in sec­ond on nine, but with the Ba­hamas in third po­si­tion on three, the bat­tle comes down to a bat­tle be­tween first and sec­ond.

David, who now plays for Ecuado­ri­an top-tier team So­ciedad De­porti­va Au­cas, touched down at the team camp in Bo­ca Ra­ton, Fort Laud­erdale in Flori­da, USA, and had some ad­vice for his team­mates.

“First­ly, let them know that it doesn’t mat­ter the rank of the team be­cause ob­vi­ous­ly, we are ranked high­er than the Ba­hamas but at the end of the day, it’s 11 ver­sus 11 and they’re not go­ing to come to lay down.

“They’re not go­ing to come and say let us give T&T the points, so we need to be fo­cused, we need to con­cen­trate from the first whis­tle and I think we need to take our chances. I think ear­ly goals will be key for us to get the con­fi­dence and make us more re­laxed in terms of play­ing more foot­ball be­cause the longer the game goes on at nil-nil, you tend to get a lit­tle bit anx­ious and a lit­tle bit im­pa­tient.

“So I think an ear­ly goal for us will be key. It is a very im­por­tant game for us, we need to leave there with three points and set up a grand fi­nale in To­ba­go against Nicaragua,” David said.

David re­mind­ed his team­mates that the Ba­hami­ans threw T&T out of the World Cup qual­i­fiers in 2021. On Tues­day, the Ba­hami­ans an­nounced their team for the en­counter. Their ros­ter com­pris­es five for­eign-based play­ers, in­clu­sive of vet­er­an “Swiss Knife” Lesly St Fleur and Christo­pher Rah­ming who told the me­dia on Tues­day that the T&T team will have some­thing to prove in the en­counter.

St Fleur said, “It’s go­ing to be an ex­cit­ing game (against Trinidad and To­ba­go), know­ing that we drew 0-0 with them the last time we played here. They have some­thing to prove so they are com­ing to play hard, and we will be ready for the task ahead.”

David and his team­mates have been set a stan­dard to fol­low af­ter the 104th-rank­ing So­ca War­riors ex­ceed­ed ex­pec­ta­tions by beat­ing 64th-ranked re­gion­al ri­vals Ja­maica 1-0 in a two-game se­ries on March 11 and 14 in Ja­maica.

David said: “The lads did a very good job in the three games they played, which shows the work they did with the coach and the ex­cel­lent job they’ve been do­ing. So it’s very good to con­tin­ue that mo­men­tum they had. Even the play­ers who are not here, they did an ex­cel­lent job, so I think the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is on us to con­tin­ue to car­ry out the great job that they’ve been do­ing which will on­ly au­gur well for the whole na­tion­al pool.”