Rachael Thomp­son-King

Cen­tres Dex­troy Man­swell and Wil­fred "Spongy" Ben­jamin put on huge per­for­mances to pi­lot Petro Jazz to a 1-0 se­ries lead af­ter an 83-74 win over De­fence Force in the Men's Di­vi­sion fi­nal of the Mack­e­son Su­per 10 Bas­ket­ball League on Thurs­day night at the Jean Pierre Com­plex in Mu­cu­rapo. Thanks to a team-high 26 points from Man­swell and Ben­jamin's 18, Jazz made a great start to the best-in-sev­en Big Four fi­nal. The match got go­ing af­ter Ash­win Creed, the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Sports, met with the play­ers. De­fence Force, four-time win­ners of the pres­ti­gious ti­tle and backed by their sup­port­ers, dom­i­nat­ed the the first half with a 19-15 first quar­ter lead, swelling that to 42-30 at the half­time in­ter­val.

Jazz, bid­ding to be­come the first team from South to lift the crown since the Carib Ball Jesters in 1989, went on a 26-12 third quar­ter run to take a two-point (56-54) ad­van­tage en­ter­ing the fi­nal ses­sion. The mo­men­tum re­mained in Jazz's favour and some­what in­spired by the fans who made the jour­ney from Ch­agua­nas, San Fer­nan­do, Pe­nal, Siparia, San­ta Flo­ra, Pa­lo Seco and Los Ba­jos, they held on to com­plete the nine-goal vic­to­ry. Man­swell al­so had 14 re­bounds, three blocks and three steals. Na­tion­al stand­out Ben­jamin pulled down 11 re­bounds, guards Richard Guisep­pi had 15 points and five steals and Sadi­ka Guer­ra fin­ished with nine points, ten re­bounds and four steals. For De­fence Force, na­tion­al for­ward Steven "Lighter" Lewis scored a league-best 42 points and added ten re­bounds. No oth­er play­ers reached dou­ble-dig­its­Game two is sched­uled for tonight at the same venue from 8 pm with game three card­ed for to­mor­row at 7 pm.