De­spite a painstak­ing 3-2 loss to re­gion­al ri­vals Ja­maica, which pre­vent­ed them from a place in the fi­nal of the Uni­ty Cup in West Lon­don, So­ca War­riors coach Dwight Yorke has praised the char­ac­ter shown by the play­ers.

The War­riors came from two goals down to lev­el the score 2-2 and could have won the match late in the game. In­stead, a mix-up in com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween de­fend­er Justin Gar­cia and goal­keep­er Mar­vin Phillip saw Re­nal­do Cephas be­ing brought down by Phillip in the penal­ty area in the 90+3 minute.

The de­vel­op­ment al­lowed Richard King to beat Phillip from the penal­ty spot for the win­ner.

Yorke, at the post-match press con­fer­ence, soon af­ter the match, said he was pleased with the fight shown by his play­ers.

"I saw a game of two halves; it wasn't a par­tic­u­lar­ly great first half for us. We were a lit­tle bit lack­adaisi­cal at times in terms of the ap­proach. We changed the sys­tem slight­ly, so we had a few days to pre­pare for the game. Don't use this as an ex­cuse, but you can see a cou­ple of new peo­ple we strug­gled with in the ear­ly part of the game.

"But cer­tain­ly, when we got our­selves back in­to the game, a foothold in­to the game, you could have seen that what we were try­ing to do in the first half didn't ma­te­ri­alise as I thought it may have, so I made a lit­tle bit of change in the sec­ond half and the play­ers seem to have got it much more," Yorke told the me­dia.

Ac­cord­ing to the for­mer T&T strik­er, "We didn't play par­tic­u­lar­ly well in the first half, but I can take the pos­i­tives and there were pos­i­tives in that de­feat. And it's the fact that they showed char­ac­ter. You see play­ers, and their will­ing­ness to get back in it. It's some­thing we ad­dressed; we spoke about be­ing a re­ac­tive team rather than a proac­tive team.

"We tend to give teams head starts, and I've said to them, you can't af­ford to give good teams head starts and then de­cide to chase them down in the sec­ond half, and we did that. That was very en­cour­ag­ing, but we've got to be able to man­age teams in a much more sen­si­ble way and not give away sil­ly goals," Yorke said.

With the re­sult, the T&T team will next face Ghana, who lost to Nige­ria in the sec­ond match of the four-na­tion tour­na­ment 2-1 at the GTECH Com­mu­ni­ty Sta­di­um in West Lon­don. The teams will bat­tle for third, while the two win­ners- Nige­ria and Ja­maica will square off in the fi­nal on May 31.

The tour­na­ment has come as an ide­al ex­pe­ri­ence for the So­ca War­riors, who will now shift their fo­cus to the World Cup Qual­i­fiers on June 6 and 10 against St Kitts & Nevis at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo, and Cos­ta Ri­ca in Cos­ta Ri­ca.

Yorke and his staff have spent most of their six-month ar­rival at­tempt­ing to in­stil their phi­los­o­phy. Fol­low­ing his loss to the Ja­maicans, who are ranked 64th to T&T's 104th on the FI­FA rank­ings, Yorke said he be­lieves the coun­try is fi­nal­ly putting to­geth­er a team that will be able to com­pete against any team in the world.

Ac­cord­ing to Yorke: "The progress we have made and what we've man­aged to build on from what the pre­vi­ous man­ag­er did, I think you can see that the team is pro­gress­ing nice­ly, but there is still a lot of hard work to be done, there is no two ways about that.

"I feel con­fi­dent. I feel that the team is buy­ing in­to the whole idea, my play­ing phi­los­o­phy, which is a key part of what you're see­ing, the im­prove­ment in the team go­ing for­ward, and we con­tin­ue to build. I still be­lieve when every­one comes and we get the pieces to­geth­er, we can com­pete at the high­est lev­el, and we showed that re­silience tonight, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the sec­ond half."

He con­clud­ed: "I think that T&T is as­sem­bling a team that could com­pete in any for­mat and any team that we come up against, they'll be look­ing over their shoul­der think­ing that, where­as in the past we used to be soft touch, I want to change that men­tal­i­ty and flip it around that they're in for a very tough game any­time they play against T&T."