Play­ers and staff from Pro League club Cen­tral FC will be in at­ten­dance at the VF Ladies' "Give Breast Can­cer the Boot" All-Fe­male Foot­ball Tour­na­ment 2012, which will be host­ed at UWI Ground, St Au­gus­tine, from 10 am, to­day. The sec­ond an­nu­al tour­na­ment will fea­ture teams from across the coun­try, play­ing to raise aware­ness of breast can­cer cen­tred char­i­ties. Cen­tral FC Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor Brent San­cho said that there was nev­er a ques­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion re­ceiv­ing sup­port from his club. "Cen­tral FC has made a com­mit­ment to sup­port worth­while com­mu­ni­ty projects, and we saw this as an ide­al op­por­tu­ni­ty to get in­volved in women's foot­ball as well as rais­ing aware­ness of the need for women to get test­ed ear­ly, to in­crease their chances of full re­cov­ery. Deal­ing with sen­si­tive women's is­sues can be a dif­fi­cult ac­com­plish­ment in a male ori­en­tat­ed sport, so we didn't hes­i­tate, es­pe­cial­ly when we saw the tour­na­ment has the back­ing of the T&T Can­cer So­ci­ety," said San­cho.

The "Shar­kettes", a women's team of the club, will rep­re­sent Cen­tral FC at the com­pe­ti­tion. The for­mer T&T in­ter­na­tion­al de­fend­er an­nounced that the club will al­so work on en­ter­ing a team in­to the Women's League Foot­ball (Wolf) in the next sea­son. Speak­ing on the event, vet­er­an mid­field­er Mar­vin Oliv­er said, "Some guys seem to think that breast can­cer can't af­fect them, but every­one of us has a moth­er, sis­ters, aunts, grand­moth­ers, wives or girl­friends and at any mo­ment this dis­ease could dev­as­tate our lives." "This is not a woman's dis­ease," said Oliv­er. "They are the vic­tims, but this is a dis­ease that af­fects the hu­man race as a whole. As a team, we are all be­hind this ex­cel­lent ini­tia­tive."