WAL­TER AL­IBEY

Se­nior Mut­li­me­dia Re­porter

wal­ter.al­ibey@guardian.co.tt

T&T is wait­ing with bat­ed breath, for the ap­point­ment of a na­tion­al foot­ball coach, fol­low­ing the ex­pi­ra­tion of the con­tract of coach An­gus Eve.

The FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, led by busi­ness­man Robert Hadad, is ex­pect­ed to de­cide on who the coach will be this week af­ter a com­pre­hen­sive re­view of the team’s per­for­mance and re­sults at the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup, the CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League and oth­er match­es and Eve will be a part of that process.

On Tues­day, Guardian Me­dia Sports re­port­ed that for­mer na­tion­al coach Stephen Hart has been tipped to re­place Eve from sources who spoke to us on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.

How­ev­er, Hadad, speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia Sports yes­ter­day said that Hart was one of many coach­es that the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee/T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion con­tact­ed to be part of the coach­ing set-up.

He re­vealed that he had al­so been com­mu­ni­cat­ing with Rus­sell Lat­apy, a for­mer na­tion­al mid­field mae­stro among oth­ers on T&T foot­ball mat­ters.

How­ev­er, Hadad ad­mit­ted that in the case of both coach­es (Hart and Lat­apy), they had en­coun­tered in-court is­sues which have now been cleared up.

“We have a lot of peo­ple we’re talk­ing to, so why they didn’t men­tion any oth­er names? We’ve been ne­go­ti­at­ing with Stephen Hart for years. Stephen Hart was owed a ton of mon­ey too. We’re talk­ing to Rus­sell Lat­apy. Rus­sell was owed a ton of mon­ey too. I’m not say­ing ei­ther of them is be­ing con­sid­ered, I’m say­ing a lot of these peo­ple have served their time and have done an amaz­ing job for this coun­try and we treat­ed them like rub­bish, we didn’t pay them their mon­ey,” Hadad ex­plained.

He not­ed fur­ther, “They had court judg­ments and they weren’t paid, so we’ve been talk­ing to all of them, so I don’t un­der­stand why some­one sin­gling out Stephen, I can’t un­der­stand that one.”

Quizzed fur­ther on whether pay­ments were made to them, he said, “We have ne­go­ti­at­ed their bal­ances al­ready, so there’s noth­ing more be­ing owed to them.”

The Courts had or­dered the TTFA to pay both coach­es over a com­bined 1.2 mil­lion dol­lars in out­stand­ing salaries owed to them over sev­er­al years.

Mean­while, Eve, who took over the coach­ing reigns from Eng­lish­man Ter­ry Fen­wick in Sep­tem­ber 2021, has a record of 12 wins, nine draws, and sev­en de­feats. Fen­wick had failed to move T&T past the pre­lim­i­nary rounds of the Caribbean qual­i­fiers to the FI­FA 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

The So­ca War­riors de­feat­ed St Kitts and Nevis 3-0 in their open­ing match in Group A of the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup. How­ev­er, T&T was beat­en 4-1 by re­gion­al ri­vals Ja­maica and that was fol­lowed by a 6-0 rout by the Amer­i­cans in the fi­nal group-stage fix­ture.

The re­sults have since made Eve, a for­mer na­tion­al stand­out, the tar­get of both crit­i­cism and sym­pa­thy from the foot­ball fra­ter­ni­ty.

Eve, who has achieved his man­date of qual­i­fy­ing for the So­ca War­riors to the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup, and in­to the ‘A’ League of the CON­CA­CAF Na­tions League has al­so helped T&T moved three places up the FI­FA rank­ing to po­si­tion 101st.

Hadad ex­plained that “An­gus is still the coach, so we can­not start a process for a man who is still there. No de­ci­sion has been made on what we do with him as yet. We have a group of peo­ple we put in place to deal with that, to do an eval­u­a­tion but it takes time, you don’t do these things in a day.”