Mon­day’s 1-1 tie with Nicaragua at the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um in Ba­co­let, To­ba­go was a “game of nasty, dirty tac­tics” as de­scribed by na­tion­al coach An­gus Eve, that en­sured the vis­i­tors go through to League ‘A’ of the CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League as Group ‘C’ win­ner, as well as au­to­mat­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup, next year.

How­ev­er, it is not the end for the So­ca War­riors qual­i­fy­ing for the Gold Cup. They will now have to go through the pre­lim­i­nary qual­i­fy­ing process.

Eve was in a bit­ter mood fol­low­ing the match, say­ing the ref­er­ee was a bit le­nient on the Nicaraguans.

“It was a match of nasty, dirty tac­tics. I thought the ref­er­ee was very le­nient on them, throw­ing a lot of foot­ball on the park, a lot of div­ing all over the pitch, which wasn’t good for the game to­day.

“I thought that we tried to play, but they def­i­nite­ly came here for a draw, they played with five in the back in the first half, and then they put on a de­fen­sive mid­field­er in the sec­ond half, and then we start­ed to get some con­trol of the game.

“I think, in the game for the most part, there were very lim­it­ed op­por­tu­ni­ties for both teams, but we still had the bet­ter of the op­por­tu­ni­ties but we just didn’t take them.

“Now we have to qual­i­fy from the pre­lim­i­nary stages of the Gold Cup and we will not move up to the ‘A’ stage, in­stead we will stay in the ‘B’ group­ing of the Na­tions League.”

CON­CA­CAF re­leased re­cent­ly that 12 teams will par­tic­i­pate in the 2023 CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup Qual­i­fiers based on the re­sults of the 2022-2023 CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League. These teams are the four group third-place teams of 2022-2023 CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League ‘A’, the four sec­ond-place fin­ish­ers from League ‘B’ and the four group win­ners from League ‘C’, which will be in­volved in a draw on April 14.

The So­ca War­riors lost to Nicaragua in their open­ing game in Man­agua 2-0 in June last year, and have now held them off 1-1 in the fi­nal match of Group C. Ar­i­anger Smith gave the Nicaraguans the ad­van­tage with a 27th-minute head­er be­fore cap­tain Jo­evin Jones equalised in the 40th minute from the penal­ty spot.

Eve said it was still a good per­for­mance by his charges, hav­ing put them­selves in a po­si­tion to seal the win in the group.

“It is a feel­ing of dis­ap­point­ment, we worked re­al­ly hard to be in this po­si­tion, I thought we had put our­selves in a re­al­ly good po­si­tion, we had the last game at home. We felt like we had a num­ber of play­ers who could have tak­en us over that line but.

“For the most part, the boys gave a fair ef­fort, you can’t fault any of them for try­ing but it was just un­for­tu­nate, we did not lose the match, but we just lose the ob­jec­tive that we were try­ing to achieve.”

“There were a lot of pos­i­tives, we scored and we cre­at­ed chances up un­til the end of the match. I think it augers well for foot­ball go­ing foot­ball, we ac­tu­al­ly didn’t lose. I thought the fight­ing spir­it of the team, we passed the ball well, I thought we moved the ball around well.

“I think some of the play­ers were a lit­tle bit tired be­cause of all the trav­el­ling in a short space of time but at the end of the day I am very proud of the guys and we still have an op­por­tu­ni­ty to qual­i­fy for the Gold cup.”

Eve not­ed that he will con­tin­ue their plans as they move for­ward, say­ing he still wants to con­tin­ue to de­vel­op the lo­cal play­ers and get match­es for them out­side the win­dow, as well as still try­ing to qual­i­fy for tour­na­ments that they want to qual­i­fy for.