A double strike by Aidan Marcano guided T&T's junior men's hockey team to a 4-2 victory over Brazil yesterday and assured them the overall seventh position in the Junior Pan American Championship in Santiago, Chile.
With a few key players missing from their roster, the T&T men fell short in their early matches, before picking up when it scarcely mattered. Yesterday, however, the T&T stickmen were in a menacing mood, first taking the lead after just a minute gone on the stop-clock, courtesy of a penalty corner by Teague Marcano.
Two minutes later, another Marcano namesake, Aidan, scored the first of his double strikes to steer the men in red, white and black to a 2-0 first-period advantage.
An in-form Marcano (Aidan) didn't take long to seal his second goal when the game resumed, giving T&T a 3-0 cushion in the second period from a field goal, but then their counterparts had decided to fight.
Paulo Rigueira, the man at the centre of the Brazilian fightback, pulled a goal back in the 30th minute to send his team to the half-time interval trailing 1-3.
T&T, despite their two-goal advantage, allowed the South Americans to cut that lead to a single goal when Rigueira fired his team's second goal in from a penalty corner in the 32nd minute.
Now trailing by one, the Brazilians appeared to be heading for the equaliser, when Ghardel Elcock intervened in the 56th minute and fired in T&T's fourth goal.
OTHER RESULTS
Argentina 2 vs Canada 1
Chile 4 vs USA 0