FRANK­FURT, Ger­many—On a his­toric Fri­day night in Ger­many, Trinidad and To­ba­go’s James Walk­lin and Joshua Bal­four carved their names in­to the an­nals of re­gion­al sport.

At the Darts World Cup, they be­came the first Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean team to ever win a match at the tour­na­ment, edg­ing 14th-ranked Latvia 4-3 in a nail-bit­ing thriller.

But as the ar­rows set­tled and the cel­e­bra­tion sub­sided, the pair had a mes­sage for the re­gion, in­vest, or be left be­hind.

Speak­ing ex­clu­sive­ly to An­dre Er­rol Bap­tiste for Is­ports on i95.5fm from the venue in Ger­many on Sat­ur­day, the duo re­flect­ed on a vic­to­ry built on ruth­less ef­fi­cien­cy.

“It’s a game of such fine mar­gins that it’s hard to de­scribe,” Walk­lin said, dis­sect­ing the his­toric win. “Against Italy, we had chances and put our­selves in good po­si­tions, but they took theirs. Against Latvia, a cou­ple of times they missed one or two darts, and we jumped on the op­por­tu­ni­ty. We al­ways knew we would be in with a chance be­cause we are good enough. We just knew that if a chance pre­sent­ed it­self, we had to take it.”

Bal­four, while proud of the land­mark vic­to­ry, quick­ly turned his gaze to the big­ger pic­ture. He stressed that Trinidad and To­ba­go’s suc­cess should not be an iso­lat­ed mir­a­cle but a cat­a­lyst for change.

“We need more rep­re­sen­ta­tion there,” Bal­four urged. Guyana went; how­ev­er, Guyana didn’t win any games. We were able to win one game com­ing from this re­gion. Ar­genti­na, which is not a Caribbean coun­try but qual­i­fied from the same re­gion we do, went there and won a game last year. We are able to com­pete with the best in the world. What we need is the op­por­tu­ni­ty.”

The T&T stand­out made a di­rect ap­peal for struc­tur­al re­form, ar­gu­ing that the Caribbean’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion path­ways are too nar­row.

“We need at least two teams to be able to come out of the re­gion,” he in­sist­ed. “We are show­ing that we are ready to chal­lenge the world, to take on the world in a sport that is ba­si­cal­ly a niche sport with­in this re­gion.”

Bal­four be­lieves that this his­toric re­sult in Ger­many is more than a head­line; it is a re­cruit­ment tool.

“It gives us a lot more ex­po­sure, and hope­ful­ly, it brings more peo­ple to darts,” he said. “We can widen the tal­ent pool to choose these play­ers from.” (CMC)