TT footballers aim to bounce back in Seoul

Trinidad and Tobago’s senior footballers arrived in Seoul on Sunday and are fine tuning their preparations for their second international outing of their Asian tour against 2002 World Cup hosts South Korea at the Seoul World Cup Stadium. The match is scheduled for tomorrow and coach Bertille St Clair and skipper Angus Eve will be hoping that the team can bounce back from a 3-2 loss to Thailand in Bangkok on Saturday after being 2-0 ahead at half time. The team was joined by solid US-based defender Derek Phillips on Sunday and CL Financial San Juan Jabloteh and former national Under-23 midfielder Michael Celestine yesterday.

Following Saturday’s defeat, experienced utility player Anthony Rougier, the scorer of the first goal, reflected on the performance and spoke about the team’s “Journey to Germany”. “The first half was very good but there are lot of things we need to work on. But you can see that the team is being built carefully. We presented ourselves very well away from home and that was admirable. Most of our downfall was because of jetlag. We need to learn from this experience,” Rougier said.

“They (Thailand) were allowed to make eight changes so there’s no reason to be upset with our players because they did well. Keyeno Thomas was awesome and Derek King was very intelligent. We also had a young team out there,” he said. “I think we have to take our hats off and say that we came up another level because Thailand didn’t have a clue of what was happening in the first half. I had a feeling about scoring because of the position I was playing just behind the front two. It felt good to score for the country again,” Rougier said.