‘Goodies’ for failure

I sincerely hope that you were able to view the proceedings that took place at the Haseley Crawford Stadium on Saturday June 24 2006 and the rewards heaped upon our National Football Team on their return from mediocrity.

You must have heard the fairy tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone was deluded into thinking that the Emperor had on a new suit. It took a smart and observant little boy in the mass of onlookers to realise that in fact the Emperor was stark naked.

How long will it take us as adults to realise that qualifying for the World Cup in Germany was not an end to a means, but just the opposite? All teams and individuals selected in any field of sport are expected to have the potential to win.

Let us take for example, a boxer. Does he train for an upcoming important fight just to enter the ring? Is this his goal?

Please, little boys and girls of TT do not let the goodies awarded for failure, be the carrot dangled in front of you in lieu of success.

Trinidad and Tobago made it to the World Cup, which made every citizen of our country proud and which our politicians used on the return of the team as a political stepladder.

The fact of the entire matter is that our performance, like the rest of the teams in the CONCACAF region, was pathetic. With the exception of Mexico, no other team from the area made it into the second round.

TT did not score a single goal against an opposing side. Does this not tell us that we of this region are not prepared or ready for the Wold Cup adventure? True, we sold TT as a land of costumes, Carnival and friendly faces, but was this why our football team was sent to Germany? The answer to that is no, yet the gods that be are already pontificating the year 2010 in South Africa.

Will we again on return, should our performance be as dismal as it was in Germany, be rewarded with units, dollars and medals and all the hype that went along with it.

Let us be brutally honest, we sent a team to Germany to bring back the World Cup to TT, although most of us knew that this was not going to be. We did however, expect that the team from TT would have done far better than they did by at least making it into the second round, yet on our return, millions of dollars were awarded to these players for stepping onto the football fields in Germany.