Trinidad and To­ba­go in­ter­na­tion­al Levi Gar­cia marked his de­but for Greece’s Panathi­naikos with the open­ing goal in their 2-1 ex­tra-time win over Bul­gar­ia’s CS­KA 1948 Sofia in their UE­FA Con­fer­ence League Round Three Qual­i­fi­er sec­ond-leg match at the Vasil Les­ki Na­tion­al Sports Acad­e­my in Sofia, Bul­gar­ia, on Tues­day.

With the sec­ond-leg win, Panathi­naikos ad­vanced 3-2 on ag­gre­gate to the fourth and fi­nal play­offs, from which the win­ners of their re­spec­tive home and away ties will qual­i­fy for the group phase of the tour­na­ment.

The 28-year-old Gar­cia, who of­fi­cial­ly re­turned to Greece af­ter com­plet­ing a sea­son-long loan move from Russ­ian club Spar­tak Moscow last week, broke the score­less dead­lock against CS­KA 1948 Sofia on the hour mark with a low left-foot­ed fin­ish from the right side of the six-yard box in­to the far cor­ner to put the vis­i­tors 1-0 up on the evening and 2-1 on ag­gre­gate, af­ter which he was sub­sti­tut­ed six min­utes lat­er for Adri­ano Ja­gu­sic.

But, three min­utes from full-time, CS­KA Sofia drew lev­el thanks to a strike from Lasha Dvali, af­ter which both teams failed to find a win­ner in the re­main­ing three min­utes of reg­u­la­tion and added time.

How­ev­er, four min­utes in­to the first half of ex­tra time, sub­sti­tute Cyriel Dessers of Nige­ria, an­oth­er off-sea­son sign­ing, came on in the 65th minute for Elmin Ras­to­dar af­ter miss­ing the first leg due to in­jury and net­ted the de­ci­sive item for Panathi­naikos, af­ter which they held firm to se­cure a 2-1 win on the day to ad­vance to the fi­nal round of qual­i­fiers against the los­er of the meet­ing be­tween the losers of the UE­FA Eu­ropa League be­tween Czechia’s Hradec Králové and Turkey’s Beşik­taş.

Go­ing in­to to­day’s sec­ond-leg match, Be­sik­tas leads their UE­FA Eu­ropa League Round Three qual­i­fiers 1-0 fol­low­ing their first-leg win on Au­gust 6.

The San­ta Flo­ra-born Gar­cia’s sea­son-long loan from Spar­tak Moscow comes with an op­tion to make the trans­fer per­ma­nent at the end of the sea­son for 12 mil­lion eu­ros.

Oth­er re­ports from Rus­sia stat­ed that this op­tion could be­come manda­to­ry if Panathi­naikos qual­i­fies for the Cham­pi­ons League qual­i­fiers and if cer­tain per­for­mance-re­lat­ed con­di­tions are met.

In ac­cor­dance with his own wish, it has been stat­ed that Gar­cia was pro­posed to Panathi­naikos, Olympia­cos, and PAOK, but not to AEK, his for­mer club. The pro­pos­al was for a loan with an op­tion to buy, which in­clud­ed a loan fee of €1,500,000 and a buy op­tion of €13,000,000, with the ac­quir­ing club cov­er­ing his salary of about €2,700,000 per year.