Trinidad and Tobago head coach Dwight Yorke said this country can no longer afford to treat any match — qualifier or friendly — as routine, insisting that the national team’s FIFA ranking has become a critical factor in shaping their competitive future.
Yorke, who took charge of the team a year ago, said T&T must urgently improve their global standing if they are to avoid difficult draws and break back into the top tier of Caribbean football.
“Trinidad and Tobago football team hasn’t got the luxury of just going through the motions” Yorke said on Monday ahead of his teams’ final World Cup qualifying fixture against Bermuda. “We need to get back to trying to be the number one team in the Caribbean. It’s not something that we’ve been able to do for a while, so that will be a target.”
The former national captain stressed that even though T&T will not be going to the World Cup, the significance of matches they will play has not changed.
“Every game, every friendly, everything that we do is geared towards being a better ranking team,” he said. “Hopefully with a victory against Bermuda we can climb up the table a little bit more. That’s something we need to get better at.”
Yorke said rankings matter more than people realise, pointing to Curacao — a team now roughly 15 places ahead of T&T — as an example of how consistent results in non-qualifying fixtures add up over time.
“I know a lot of people may not look at that as a significant thing, but it is vitally important that our ranking is better,” he said. “Those are the numbers and the gap these teams have got ahead of us.”
He explained that higher rankings translate directly to more favourable draws, which can dramatically alter a qualifying campaign.
Reflecting on the campaign now ending, Yorke noted that T&T had three straight away games and that the order in which they played their final qualifying matches could have made a difference in the final result.
He pointed to this cycle as an example of how early match-ups influenced T&T’s fate.
“Maybe if we had a better ranking, instead of getting three games in a row away, we might have gotten two,” he said. “Instead of playing Jamaica early on, we might have gotten Jamaica later in the last game and played Bermuda first. From a psychological point of view, if we were to beat Bermuda on Thursday (and then face Jamaica in the final match) we might have been closer in terms of points.”
He added that these “permutations” are not luck but consequences of ranking position — something T&T must control moving forward.
“We need to close the gap in every sense,” he said. “Every game we play is geared towards a better ranking. And a better ranking means that when the draw comes around next time, we’ll be in a much healthier place to take on the teams likely to be drawn against us.”
