De­fend­ing cham­pi­ons Cheryl Mi­ni Mart won the knock out ti­tle on the open­ing night of the third an­nu­al Buc­coo Ball Park Foot­ball League at the Buc­coo In­te­grat­ed Car Park on Fri­day night.

In front of hun­dreds of fans, Mi­ni Mart got past Miller FC in a penal­ty shoot out as An­del "Scoo­by" No­ray got the win­ning kick in a sud­den death penal­ty shout out af­ter the scores re­main goal­less af­ter reg­u­lar time and the first round of the shoot out. The John Boyce-coached team showed its strength in the elim­i­na­tion rounds ear­li­er in the night.

Four­teen teams are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the six-week long tour­na­ment in­clud­ing a team of Nige­ri­ans, Jano Africa FC, who are stu­dents at the To­ba­go Hos­pi­tal­i­ty and Tourism In­sti­tute. Tour­na­ment Chair­man Kay­lon Camp­bell said the aim of the tour­na­ment is to en­cour­age the young foot­balling tal­ent in Buc­coo.

"One of the ob­jec­tives is to gar­ner young tal­ent so the ma­jor­i­ty of the teams are from Buc­coo so we don't have out­side teams tak­ing over the com­pe­ti­tion. Al­so we have young ven­dors who are not yet es­tab­lished."

An­cil Den­nis, area rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Buc­coo/Mt Pleas­ant, de­scribed the tour­na­ment as the best night foot­ball league in To­ba­go. He en­cour­aged the play­ers to play hard and fair. Den­nis is a for­mer play­er and is the cur­rent man­ag­er of the Sandy Street Unit­ed team.

In the first game of the night Lataru­ga edged FC Buc­coon­ers 1-0. League ac­tions start­ed last night and will con­tin­ue on Wednes­days and Fri­days from 7 pm.

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