Warriors look for positive show against Iran

The Guardian – TEHRAN, T&T’s So­ca War­riors will square off with hosts Iran in an in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly at the Aza­di Sta­di­um in Tehran from 6 pm lo­cal time (10:30 am TT Time) to­day.

Coach Den­nis Lawrence will be look­ing to pro­duce a busi­ness-like per­for­mance as his team at­tempts to fin­ish the year on a high. Lawrence’s men suf­fered two de­feats in five in­ter­na­tion­al match­es this year, scor­ing three wins.

Speak­ing at a me­dia brief­ing at the Iran Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion head­quar­ters on the eve of the match, Lawrence said he ex­pects a fierce chal­lenge from the hosts.

“We’re here to take part in a com­pet­i­tive in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly. We ex­pect it to be a very, very tough game be­cause the Iran­ian foot­ball team is a fan­tas­tic team at the mo­ment. They’ve done very well at the last World Cup so we’re ex­pect­ing it to be very dif­fi­cult. But we’re men­tal­ly fo­cused and we are go­ing to give it our best to get a per­for­mance in first and fore­most, and hope­ful­ly the per­for­mance gives us a re­sult,” Lawrence said.

“The play­ers are here to take the op­por­tu­ni­ty. Our tar­get and our aim is to com­pete. We’re prepar­ing for the Gold Cup in June and this is part of our prepa­ra­tion, so the op­por­tu­ni­ty is there for these play­ers to stake their claim and put in a per­for­mance against a team that has a very ex­pe­ri­enced man­ag­er in Queiros who has put to­geth­er a phi­los­o­phy and play­ing style for Irani foot­ball that I think suits their foot­ball.”

“I think we all un­der­stand what this guy of­fers the Iran foot­ball team,” Lawrence added. “We had a good look at them in the World Cup, they are very com­pet­i­tive and very ag­gres­sive in a pos­i­tive way,” Lawrence not­ed.

Quizzed on whether the T&T team had any play­ers in the mould of Dwight Yorke, Lawrence said, “I don’t think we have a play­er at that lev­el. Yorke played in the Cham­pi­ons League, won the Cham­pi­ons League and played in the Pre­mier League for a num­ber of years. And that’s the tar­get we need to get back too. We need to have play­ers play­ing in the more com­pet­i­tive lev­els be­cause then it helps the foot­ball and helps the play­ers around. The idea now is for us to put to­geth­er as a group and de­vel­op our younger tal­ent to get them back to that lev­el. We are go­ing to cre­ate the Yorkes, the Stern Johns, the Rus­sell Lat­apys and the Mar­vin An­drews over a num­ber of years, but for now, it’s all about ba­by steps.”

The Iran­ian Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion has agreed to have a minute si­lence be­fore kick-off in re­mem­brance of for­mer T&T de­fend­er Jl­loyd Samuel who played in Iran for three years and his team Es­tegh­lal was based at the venue for to­day’s en­counter.

Samuel died trag­i­cal­ly in a car crash in May this year. His wife He­lia Sahi­mi met with the team at the Par­sian Es­tegh­lal ho­tel yes­ter­day and will be a guest at the match. Ira­ni­ans women will not be al­lowed to at­tend the match but spe­cial per­mis­sion has been grant­ed for her to at­tend.