New caretaker coach of the TT men's football team, Derek King, will get his first chance to lead his charges in competitive action on home soil when they play French Guiana from 7 pm at the Dwight Yorke Stadium in Bacolet, Tobago on September 10 in League A of the Concacaf Nations League.
The match will be TT's second in their 2024/25 Concacaf Nations League campaign, with TT set to face Honduras at the Nacional Chelato Ucles, Tegucigalpa on September 6 in their opening encounter.
TT have been drawn in group B alongside Cuba, French Guiana, Honduras, Jamaica and Nicaragua, but owing to the peculiar format of the tourney, they will not face Jamaica or Nicaragua as they aim to qualify for the knockout stages for the second straight Nations League edition.
The Soca Warriors will close off their campaign with a pair of games against Caribbean rivals Cuba. TT will play away to Cuba on October 10, before hosting the return fixture on October 14.
The top two teams in the two Nations League A groups will advance to the quarterfinals where they will join the four top-ranked League A teams: Canada, Mexico, Panama and reigning champs USA, who defeated TT at the quarterfinal stage of the 2023/24 edition.
Under former head coach Angus Eve, who was sacked on July 31, the Soca Warriors advanced to the knockout stages of Nations League for the first time in the last edition of the tournament.
In a group which included Curacao, El Salvador, Guatemala, Martinique and Panama, TT finished second with nine points after getting three wins in four matches. TT had multiple close wins in the group stage of the last campaign, including respective last-gasp 1-0 and 3-2 wins over Curacao and Guatemala at the Hasely Crawford Stadium in Mucurapo. Twenty-year-old forward Nathaniel James announced himself to the TT public with the winning goals in the aforementioned games.
TT's 2023/24 Nations League campaign ended with a 4-2 aggregate loss to the US, with the Soca Warriors also succumbing to Canada in their subsequent Copa America 2024 play-in match this March.
On the Soca Warriors' last visit to the Bacolet venue on March 27, 2023, they played to a 1-1 draw with Nicaragua in what was a must-win encounter on the quest for promotion from the 2022/23 Nations League B cycle for both teams. The Soca Warriors didn't get the desired result on that Bacolet night, but they were belatedly elevated to Nations League A after Nicaragua were deemed to have used an ineligible player in the 2022/23 campaign.
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