HOUS­TON – Grena­da suf­fered their sec­ond straight 4-0 drub­bing of the CON­CA­CAF Gold Cup in an­oth­er chas­ten­ing de­feat, this time to Asian cham­pi­ons Qatar in Texas, USA on Sat­ur­day night.

Af­ter los­ing their open­ing Group D game to Hon­duras by the same mar­gin last Tues­day, Grena­da con­ced­ed three first half goals to find them­selves out of con­tention from ear­ly in the con­test at the BB­VA Sta­di­um.

Ab­de­laz­iz Ha­tim opened the scor­ing in the 11th minute be­fore Akram Afif dou­bled his side’s tal­ly in the 22nd and Mo­hammed Muntari added the third in the 36th minute.

Al Moez net­ted a fourth im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter the break to put the game well out of sight.

“We’re ob­vi­ous­ly dis­ap­point­ed. We had sec­tions of the game but we def­i­nite­ly had is­sues deal­ing with the move­ment and sec­ondary move­ment, and chang­ing the points of at­tack and their move­ment of the ball,” said Grena­da head coach Michael Find­lay.

“It was a ques­tion­able first goal. We had to re­bound from that and we went in at half-time, as­sessed the sit­u­a­tion and had to re­load, so to speak, and un­for­tu­nate­ly we lost an ear­ly goal in the sec­ond half which was very dis­ap­point­ing.

“We re­cov­ered from that and made our best ef­forts to get back in­to the game. I feel for the play­ers once again be­cause I be­lieve their ap­pli­ca­tion was ex­cel­lent.”

Goal­keep­er Ja­son Bel­fon went down af­ter clash­ing with Ab­de­laz­iz Ha­tim who went aer­i­al for a head­er, and then tapped in the loose ball with Grena­da ap­peal­ing in vain for a foul.

Ja­cob Berke­ley-Agye­pong then poked wide at the oth­er end in the 18th minute be­fore Akram Afif ex­tend­ed Qatar’s lead by curl­ing home from 20 yards.

Muntari head­ed in Akram Afif’s cor­ner from close range at the near post be­fore cap­tain Aaron Pierre failed to make a reg­u­la­tion in­ter­cep­tion in the box from a right-sided cross, leav­ing Al Moez with a straight­for­ward tap-in in the first minute af­ter the break.

Grena­da’s fi­nal game is against Pana­ma on Tues­day.

In the oth­er Group D fix­ture, Hon­duras scored two goals in the space of five min­utes through Alexan­der López (61st) and Romell Quioto (65th) as they re­bound­ed from 2-1 down at half-time to beat Pana­ma 3-2.

CMC