There's still hope of a quar­ter­fi­nal berth for the T&T So­ca War­riors de­spite a 5-0 beat­ing by the Unit­ed States, which has now been cou­pled with a 1-1 tie with Haiti in Group D of the Con­ca­caf Gold Cup in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da.

The Haitians were re­duced to 10 men in an en­thralling con­test at the Shell En­er­gy Sta­di­um in Hous­ton, Texas, on Thurs­day (June 19). Na­tion­al coach Dwight Yorke said his play­ers shied away from the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of tak­ing the game in their hands.

"I felt like in the first half, we were not cre­ative enough, peo­ple were not tak­ing the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, like they were afraid to make mis­takes. I try to get my play­ers to get away from that men­tal­i­ty and be on the front foot, to play pos­i­tive­ly, and to push teams back to­wards their goal, but what we did with the man ad­van­tage, you see a lot of play­ers show­ing up be­cause they want­ed the ball and that's what we need­ed from the be­gin­ning and not when we have the ad­van­tage in our way."

T&T's en­try in­to the quar­ter­fi­nals of the Gold Cup de­pends on a must-win re­sult when they face Sau­di Ara­bia Sun­day (June 22) at the Al­le­giant Sta­di­um in Las Ve­gas at 7 pm. The Saud­is got a 3-1 win over the So­ca War­riors last year in an in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly con­test at the Al Shabab Club Sta­di­um in Riyadh.

De­spite the re­sults so far, the War­riors, with one point to date, can ad­vance out of the group as the sec­ond-place team with a vic­to­ry over the Saud­is. This af­ter the US held off Sau­di Ara­bia on Thurs­day, keep­ing the Saud­is on three points from a 1-0 win over Haiti last Sun­day (June 15).

The Haitians, who al­so have a point, will have an im­prob­a­ble task of beat­ing the US to go to four points.

Yorke, in the post-match press con­fer­ence, said he knew it was go­ing to be a dif­fi­cult task against the Haitians, but his play­ers are de­serv­ing of get­ting some­thing out of the match.

"We know com­ing in­to the game was al­ways go­ing to be a tough ask, in terms of what we know Haiti was go­ing to pro­vide in terms of their phys­i­cal­i­ty and their strengths in the wide ar­eas. I think in the first half, we were not re­al­ly at the races.

"The play­ers found it dif­fi­cult to get go­ing, we couldn't get a foothold in the game, and I have to give Haiti cred­it in terms of how they played first half. But we know that once they got the man sent off, the ad­van­tage was shift­ed slight­ly in our favour, al­though they still seem to have a foothold in the game. And to con­cede the way we did, so that re­al­ly sort of knocked us back a bit. But at the end of the day, we're still in with a chance, so we're very grate­ful for that as well."

Yorke's men will, lat­er this year, con­test the fi­nal round of World Cup qual­i­fiers in a group along­side Ja­maica, Cu­ra­cao and Bermu­da, and need to win to earn au­to­mat­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tion to next year's FI­FA World Cup in the USA, Mex­i­co and Cana­da. Yorke said the lack of ag­gres­sion by his play­ers is some­thing they'll have to learn from if they are to progress fur­ther in the Gold Cup and world foot­ball.

"I have to de­fend my play­ers in many re­spects be­cause they're still in the learn­ing process, and they still think I'm rel­a­tive­ly new to the job. And I'm not mak­ing ex­cus­es for my play­ers, but we have to grow up very quick­ly. You have to be more phys­i­cal, be­cause when you're play­ing at this lev­el, there's a lot of phys­i­cal­i­ty and en­er­gy that you play with, so you need to bring that to the game a lit­tle bit more," Yorke said.