Kieron Edwards, president of the T&T Football Association, says he is not attempting to hold on to power as head of local football.
Though in the midst of a football congress to embellish local football, Edwards took the time to respond to a call by football administrators Ken Butcher and Keith Look Loy, both of whom called for the entire football executive to resign.
The calls came following the failure of the country’s men’s and women’s team to advance to the final round of the World Cup qualifiers, which came on the heels of unsuccessful attempts by the country’s under-17 girls’ and boys’ teams, as well as the country’s under-20 team that lost 3-0 to Costa Rica, which prevented them from advancing from the tournament.
Look Loy, in his column from The Dressing Room, said, “TTFA president Kieron Edwards and his executive committee need to find the individual and collective dignity to fall on their sword and allow Trinidad and Tobago football the opportunity to salvage itself.
“The Association’s woesome leadership has held office now for exactly two years and has nothing but a wretched catalogue of failure to show for its presumptive efforts.
“Football is in crisis, the situation is urgent, and the national public is exhausted. The latest low is the 2-0 defeat of our women’s team in Concacaf W Championship qualifying (and therefore in FIFA World Cup qualifying) by El Salvador. National teams are the battle fleet of any country, and our fleet now sits at the bottom of football’s ocean. All our teams but the flagship—the men’s selection—failed to qualify even for their respective Concacaf final World Cup qualifying tournaments. Today, we are starring in Salvadoran football’s highlight reel. Why? Because last Friday evening, El Salvador’s women wrote history, qualifying for the first time for one of the 12 Concacaf W tournaments held to date.”
Edwards told Guardian Media Sports on Thursday that both Butcher and Look Loy have been involved in T&T football for decades, but neither has done anything to help the country qualify for the World Cup at either the senior or the youth level.
Look Loy, he said, was in charge of one of the worst qualifying campaigns in the country’s history, as the team lost to Guyana and failed to get into the final round. Yet, he said neither Butcher nor Look Loy resigned for the roles they played.
According to the local football boss, there are measures in the TTFA Constitution if his executive believes he is not doing what he was elected to do.
He pointed to the upcoming AGM at which members can make a decision if they want to. “There are measures in the Constitution to deal with that. I am going before the membership at our AGM later this year, and they can take the measures that they want and demand them. I have no problem with putting myself before the membership.”
“The AGM is the supreme legislative body of the T&T Football Association, so I will continue to put myself forward to the membership, and they will do as they see fit,” Edwards explained.
Edwards, who was elected in April 2024, took a swipe at critics of the country’s World Cup campaign, which was described as a nightmare in some quarters.
“We have to take things into consideration and into context. We would have come into power on April 13, 2024, and the World Cup campaign started literally a few months after that. We’d have made our first World Cup campaign in the preliminary rounds, and this team was a team we inherited,” Edwards said.
He said, “We’ve been talking about this grandparent law, but no one did anything. We would have gone through the trenches with two different governments to ensure that this bill was passed, and it gives us the best opportunity to acquire the best talent with a Trinidad and Tobago passport.”
