The greatest no-plan planners

April 09, 2001

My good friend "Sticko" says "if T&T makes it to the World Cup finals in Korea/Japan in 2002, then God is most certainly a Trini."

What hurts most is despite the fact this country can boast about possessing so many intelligent citizens, not much intelligent functioning takes place here. We seem to lack the capacity to plan anything or to devise coherent strategies towards meaningful and fundamental development.

And we are talking here about "development" that is sustainable. We are the greatest "no-plan planners" the world has ever seen. Everything is left to chance, everything is "vie-kee-vie" and anything that happens, happens "by vaps". The very words "vaps" and "vie-kee-vie" indicate language that suggests a particular way of thinking and doing that is deeply psychological and cultural.

Of course the "psyche" and "culture" of a people are always fully interwoven. No where else is this as clear as in the case of the administration of our football.

Our football is going nowhere because we do not have a clue as to what is required to develop the sport nationally. We do not have a development plan that would take each player from childhood to adulthood.

We seem unable to comprehend that mature football requires mature players. Players are expected to grow with their game. Moreover, the mature game presupposes certain "core competencies", to use the nowadays preferred jargon, that all players who wish to attain the pinnacle must master through hard work, discipline, strength of character and commitment.

No modern-day footballer can get far without the core competencies of ball-control, passing, off-the-ball play, offensive and defensive use of space, dead-ball set plays, etc, etc.

It is the very said thing that demarcates Jamaica from T&T. How come on this God's earth, T&T is rated at 29th in the world by FIFA and Jamaica is way down the line? That is only as amazing as it is laughable.

The Jamaicans, players as well as administrators, have proven able to maintain focus both on and off the field. They decided very early what they wanted to achieve and set down a coherent plan to accomplish their objective.

They recognised the affinity in style and rhythm between Caribbean and Latin Americans and so opted for a Brazilian coach whom they made TD (technical director) in charge of all football in Jamaica, so that players at all levels would be playing the same game, applying and maintaining therein the same structures. In a similar regard T&T suffers from collective amnesia about the effectiveness of "Brunner" and the St Benedict team of the '60s.

To date, Jamaica has qualified for four World Cups - two under-17, one under-23 and one senior which brought them to France in 1998. Their level and quality of play have been quite consistent in recent times, not having lost at home for quite a while.

T&T, on the other hand, has been quite inconsistent in the quality of play. We qualified for one World Cup under Bertille St Clair and since then we have been failing horribly.

At every level, there are different coaches who originate from different parts of the world and who utilise different approaches. There is no co-ordination, no harmonisation, and players move from level to level only to find themselves more confused than before.

In the end we always seem to lack the fire and the guts and the intelligence in the course of our engagements because our preparation is always poor and our development process devoid of coherent vision and purpose.

In both the recent under-20 qualifiers on home soil and our senior team's appearance in Costa Rica, we were exposed and made to look the fools that we are. It is evident our players are yet to comprehend that when "on the ball" or "in attack" you maintain your structure, but when your team is "off the ball" or "in defence" you have to assume your opponents' structure in order to properly "mark them off".

That is the constant swing from one stance to another or the "carousel" for which the Dutch team of the Cyruff era became famous.

We said elsewhere that "when the nations of the world are arrayed against each other in the Cup finals, the intensity of the passion shown seems to suggest that the games are almost a substitute for war. It is when the colours and flags of nations come to the forefront and every single jot, every iota, of psychological advantage is deemed spinally crucial and brought to bear on proceedings.

"Such trooping of colours demands fierce loyalty and millions of people gird and steel themselves for the pain and the joy produced by the beautiful game of inner rhythm and poetry which is the harmony between player and player, and patriot and ball, in attack and defence. It is about blood and sand! Catpiss and pepper!

"It is the game given to the world by the British working-class, a game in which each player, each patriot, stands stripped of all social baggage, devoid of all irrelevancies, with only that which count, namely, innate skill, gait and poise, special talent, discipline in craft and power of concentration. 'Ball, boy!' the crowd shouts in salutations.

"It is not a team that goes to the World Cup finals," the European coach advised T&T's technical officials in '89. "It is a country that goes. It is not only the team but the entire country that has to be ready..." In that sense we have to become serious planners in every aspect of our existence. We must change culturally.

We must opt now for the hard, painstaking work of building patiently and intelligently from the ground up and stop rushing only for the spectacle of big events which are really supposed to be the end-result of, rather than a substitute for, the technical building process and hard work.

Imagine, Jack Warner & Co "seem always to be looking to stage some world tournament even if it involves seven-a-side ancient and obese 'stars' contesting for $100,000 prizes, while our game needs technical improvement and our players are still in want of basic needs and facilities.

"We are now building five stadiums around the country to stage the Under-17 world's tournament at tremendous cost but our national players do not have the money to train properly, to be encamped permanently nor to go on tours to develop their skills by engaging top class teams as Jamaica does."

Imagine too that we are due to face Mexico on April 25 and our entire team is yet to be encamped. So obviously we shall hustle to put them together overnight, even play some insignificant team like Cuba, and end up as we always do, without the confidence to engage the midfield, but with the one-dimensional utilisation of the long ball to Dwight Yorke up front, hoping by some miracle that, though tightly marked, he might score. And so we shall hope and hope and hope.