T&T So­ca War­riors coach Dwight Yorke says his play­ers will now turn their at­ten­tion to the re­sump­tion of their sec­ond Con­ca­caf World Cup qual­i­fiers against St Kitts/Nevis on Fri­day, in Group B at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, Mu­cu­rapo, from 7.30 pm.

This fol­lows Sat­ur­day’s 4-0 loss to four-time African Na­tion Cup win­ners Ghana ‘Black Stars’, in their third-place play­off at Brent­ford’s GTECH Com­mu­ni­ty Sta­di­um in Eng­land, which fol­lowed a 2-3 loss in their semi­fi­nal to Ja­maica at the same venue on Tues­day.

Speak­ing af­ter his team’s heavy de­feat to the Africans, the 53-year-old Yorke, re­flect­ing on his team’s two match­es in the tour­na­ment, said, “Many peo­ple may not think it was suc­cess­ful be­cause the re­sult shows that, and quite right­ly so. But, from a coach­ing per­spec­tive, you get to spend a few more days, ten days, with the play­ers and get to know them again and get to see play­ers that were in the pre­vi­ous squad.”

He said, “We know the in­ter­na­tion­al win­dow is not open to al­low us to get all the play­ers, and so the op­por­tu­ni­ty presents it­self for main­ly the lo­cal play­ers to then come and play in the Pre­mier League Sta­di­um, the GTech Sta­di­um, and to trav­el to Eng­land and to ex­pe­ri­ence in­ter­na­tion­al foot­ball at the high­est lev­el.

“Ja­maica was ob­vi­ous­ly a good test for us, and I thought it was a game of two halves where the first half was pre­dom­i­nant­ly dom­i­nat­ed by Ja­maica, and then, of course, in the sec­ond half, we cer­tain­ly took con­trol of that, and I am sure every­one who would have looked at that game or viewed it would have thought we had a chance to win it.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, re­sults don’t go our way, but there were a lot of pos­i­tives from it, and then mov­ing on to this Ghana game, we had to give the oth­er play­ers an op­por­tu­ni­ty to play be­cause I al­ways felt as an ex-play­er that it’s very dif­fi­cult to bring play­ers this far and not give them the ex­pe­ri­ence of play­ing.”

“I wouldn’t say my hands were forced, but we had to give these play­ers a chance to see if they were ca­pa­ble of play­ing at that lev­el.

The re­sult looks like a neg­a­tive one, and it is, but there were a lot of pos­i­tives from the way I think and take this team for­ward.’

There is work to be done. There has been some suc­cess along the way, and there is go­ing to be a lit­tle bit of a bumpy road along the way. We come a lit­tle bit now where this is a slight bumpy road, but the name of the game and to get bet­ter is that you have to learn from your mis­takes to im­prove as a team, and we had rel­a­tive­ly good suc­cess ear­ly on, and even though these games are friend­ly, at this lev­el they kind of ex­pose you in so many ways that you can then go back even as a coach and with my back­room staff and look at what we could have done bet­ter to make sure that this sce­nario doesn’t hap­pen, and I think that we have learnt a lot from it.”

“So, there are a lot of pos­i­tives, and I am still very ex­cit­ed and very op­ti­mistic about where the fu­ture lies when it comes to these play­ers.