Boyce takes positive after U-14 CFU Challenge Series exit

​Trinidad and Tobago Under-14 Boys football team coach Randolph Boyce says there are a lot of positives he and his coaching staff have taken away from their participation in the Caribbean Football Union Challenge Series at Cap Cana Sports City, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

​On Wednesday, the young Soca Warriors won their final Tier I Group B match against French Guiana 4-1 to finish in the runner-up spot in the four-team group. They finished with four points, the same as Puerto Rico, but ahead on goals scored (seven to two) after both teams ended with the same goal difference of zero.

​T&T kicked off the tournament with a 1-1 draw against Puerto Rico before suffering a 4-1 loss to group winner Haiti. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico went down to French Guiana 1-0, but ended on a high by beating Haiti by the same 1-0 margin. The Haitians won their other match in the group, 5-2 over French Guiana.

​With only the best second-placed team advancing to the semifinals from the three Tier I groups, T&T was edged out by Group A runner-up Bermuda, who tallied five points—two behind group winners Dominican Republic. Jamaica qualified as Group C winners with a maximum of nine points from their three wins.

​In the Tier I semifinals today, Jamaica meets Bermuda, while the second- and third-best group winners, Haiti and Dominican Republic, clash in the other semifinal. The final is set for Sunday.

​Reflecting on the tournament, Boyce, who coaches St Benedict’s College in the Secondary Schools Football League Premier Division, said: “It was interesting and I like it because it means development will be taking place.”

​With tournament rules requiring all players on team rosters to play at least 70 minutes, Boyce believes the regulation prevents young players from being brought to tournaments only to spend most of their time on the bench because a coach is focused solely on results.

​”Otherwise, you could bring a player and that player might get 15 minutes or 20 minutes because you are fighting to win, and you forget about the development of the player,” he said. “So this format is something I think we could even introduce into T&T youth football to encourage development. It might be a task on the administration side to keep check of the minutes they accumulate, but I think it was nice.”

With respect to the competitive nature of the group T&T contested, Boyce said it was important for exposing the young players to the standard required internationally.

​”I am glad that the group we were in was a tough group,” he said. “If you go and play in an easy group and you win, to me that is a false positive and we wouldn’t learn much. We need to see where the gap is, and then know how to go and close the gap and what to do to close the gap.”

​He acknowledged that this developmental approach can sometimes be at odds with the expectations of supporters, who naturally want to see national teams win.

“That is a different thing from my mindset to a spectator mindset, to a supporter mindset or somebody who is patriotic about T&T football,” Boyce said. “Their main focus, even if it is Under-14, U-17 or U-20, is on the ‘W’ and where you finish, and not necessarily on the well-being and the development of the player, so there are different perspectives.”

Commenting on the loss to the Haitians, Boyce said he deliberately avoided being overly critical of the players after that match because many of the goals came from individual mistakes, which are part of the learning process at this age.

​”The Haiti game, I wasn’t too critical on the players or coming down on them or anything like that,” he said. “We had too many individual mistakes, but we reviewed the game, pointed out the mistakes, and showed them.”

​Boyce was complimentary of Haiti’s development programme and said there are lessons T&T can take from what other countries in the region are doing.

“Haiti is a nice, developed team. They are doing something good there with the development that we could take note of,” he said. “We had conversations with all the teams, in terms of the management and staff. We had conversations with all of them to find out how they do things and to learn from it, because that is what the tournament is for—learning from each other.”

He said the T&T staff intends to take some of those lessons back home and make adjustments to the programme.

“We would definitely be doing some things differently and adding some things,” Boyce said. “And I know we will have the support on the back end to be able to do things differently, just as we need the backing of the other coaches, the clubs and the schools.”

The T&T coach noted that one of the main challenges facing youth football is finding the correct balance between winning and developing players.

“Everybody keeps chasing the ‘W’ and not the development,” he said. “So it is between winning and development where people have to decide where they want to be. No matter the age group—it can be nine, it can be eight, it can be ten—sometimes the focus is on the ‘W’ rather than the ‘D’, which is the development. But that is a different perspective and probably a different conversation for another time.”

From a playing standpoint, Boyce said the staff deliberately asked the U-14s to adopt an aggressive, high-pressing style throughout the competition.

“We chose to play in the high-press way because we want to get them playing that way at an international level,” he said. “When they become comfortable with that, we will know that there are different methods and different ways to play at different times, different phases and different moments of the game, and we will introduce them to that as they go further.

“The first priority, however, is raising the overall speed and intensity of T&T’s youth football. We want to bring up the energy level and the way that we play,” Boyce said. “We play too laid-back and too slow sometimes, so we want to change the culture a little bit and let the culture be aggressive and let the culture be about playing a little faster.

“If you play fast, you have to think faster. You have to make your decisions faster. Speed of thought, speed of play, speed of decision-making—speed of everything.”

Boyce added that once the players become comfortable operating at that tempo, they can then learn how to manage different phases of a match and recognise when to slow the game down.

“If we could reach that level, then we could understand the different moments when we need to slow down and those kinds of things. All in all, it was a good experience for the boys, a good experience for the staff and a good experience for the member association as well; now we see how we push forward from here,” Boyce said.