Trinidad and Tobago
Home; 2006/07
Trinidad and Tobago have, to date, only qualified for one World Cup and this is the shirt they wore when they made their debut at the 2006 finals in Germany. I felt that that was as good a reason as any to pick this one up to fill the spot for the Soca Warriors in my collection. While it is simply an Adidas template of the time, it can’t really be called a boring design. The asymmetric collar and white panel moving away from it almost resembles a the wearer’s head being lassoed towards their own armpit. This shirt was also famously popular in Scotland during the tournament, owing in no small part to Trinidad and Tobago being drawn into the same group as England. This gave the Tartan Army reason to shout for the underdog against the Auld Enemy (it should also be noted that a quarter of the Soca Warriors quad were playing in Scotland at the time). This led to a shortage of shirts in the UK, with Trinidadians living there struggling to get kits in time for the tournament.
There seems to be two slightly different versions of this shirt. My one has a heat-printed crest (which had also been seen on the previous kit) while others have an sewn on patch crest. For a long time, I thought the heat pressed replicas were made quickly to meet the demand mentioned in the previous paragraph. I had presumed that as the players wore the sewn on patch badge during the World Cup, that was what Adidas intended for all the replicas. But then when researching the shirt’s history more thoroughly for this post, I found that the heat-pressed version was actually worn in a friendly against Iceland in London in February 2006, which means this was actually the original version of the shirt.
The Soca Warriors wouldn’t make it past the group stages - nor indeed score a goal - in Germany that summer, but would pick up a point in their opening game against Sweden. A pair of 2-0 losses followed against England and Paraguay respectively, which ended their interests. The red home shirt was worn in the first two games, but a clash with Paraguay’s red and white stripes was unavoidable as the Warriors’ away shirt was just a reversal of the colours.. Therefore, despite being the designated home team, Paraguay also had to wear their away shirt of blue in that game.
The home shirt would remain in use in 2007, including being worn at the u17 World Cup in South Korea. That tournament was something of “one step forward, two steps back” on the 2006 senior World Cup with the young Soca Warriors managing to score a goal, but lost all three games.
