Dwight Yorke's un­veil­ing as the coun­try's new na­tion­al foot­ball coach on Thurs­day at a sim­ple cer­e­mo­ny at the Ato Boldon Sta­di­um in Bal­main, Cou­va, came with a ral­ly­ing of the stake­hold­ers to sup­port their vi­sion of World Cup qual­i­fi­ca­tion.

The un­veil­ing was at­tend­ed by a wide cross-sec­tion of the foot­ball fra­ter­ni­ty, which in­clud­ed Min­is­ter of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Sham­fa Cud­joe-Lewis, the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) pres­i­dent Kieron Ed­wards and his vice pres­i­dents - Jame­son Rigues, Col­in Mu­ray and Os­mond Down­er and sev­er­al oth­er TTFA mem­bers.

Yorke re­mind­ed the gath­er­ing that they did it back in 2006 and can do it again. How­ev­er, it re­quired an ef­fort that in­clud­ed all of T&T, in­clud­ing the gov­ern­ment, cor­po­rate cit­i­zens, and the peo­ple.

Yorke said: "Let me say it's a great ho­n­our to be se­lect­ed as the head coach of the na­tion­al team. To me, this is an emo­tion­al day on many fronts. As a lit­tle boy grow­ing up, on the small is­land of To­ba­go, I nev­er en­vis­aged for one mo­ment that I would be in this po­si­tion.

"Those of you who have fol­lowed my ca­reer, have cer­tain­ly fol­lowed the foot­prints of me mak­ing it from To­ba­go to the very heights of play­ing for Man­ches­ter Unit­ed. I haven't felt this way since 2006 when, in terms of pub­lic sup­port, it has been quite in­cred­i­ble. As a mat­ter of fact, I thought that it would be, but when I got here, the re­al­i­ty kicked in.

"The fact that the pub­lic is ex­cit­ed, and you can see the ex­cite­ment is brought back in­to the foot­ball, tells me what foot­ball, and the role that foot­ball plays, in so­ci­ety to­day. The uni­ty, uni­fy­ing the peo­ple, bring­ing the young boys and girls to­geth­er, bring­ing every­one to­geth­er, and hope­ful­ly with my in­put, and with the back­room staff, with the tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor's sup­port, the pub­lic sec­tor's sup­port, the sup­port of the pres­i­dent and the vice pres­i­dents, I am sure that we can bring suc­cess to the na­tion once again."

"I do want to stress though, that there is a lot of hard work ahead. This is not go­ing to be an easy chal­lenge, but it's a chal­lenge that I want, not just my­self, the pub­lic, and the play­ers to take on be­cause I think as a na­tion if we all pull in the one di­rec­tion there is no rea­son why we can­not be suc­cess­ful, we did it in 2006 and cer­tain­ly can do it for 2026."

Yorke and his staff - as­sis­tant coach­es Rus­sell Lat­apy, Derek King and Neil Wood, as well as strength and con­di­tion­ing coach An­tho­ny Crea, have been with the team just three days at a live-in camp at the "Home of Foot­ball" in Bal­main where the aim is to max­imise on prepa­ra­tion as they were un­able to get a friend­ly match for the cur­rent FI­FA Win­dow of No­vem­ber 11-19.

Yorke's first World Cup qual­i­fi­er will be in June next year against St Kitts & Nevis.

To date, the So­ca War­riors have four points from a 2-2 tie with Grena­da and a 7-1 crush­ing of the Ba­hamas ear­li­er in June, both of which came un­der An­gus Eve.

Yorke said he is grate­ful for the work done by Eve and King and plans to build on it for the qual­i­fiers.