Alvin?Corneal

Some folks do not even like to call kick­ing of penal­ties in a foot­ball game to de­cide the re­sult as a de­feat.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the cur­rent law per­tain­ing to the fi­nal re­sult of a knock­out match, is the on­ly way, hence the rea­son why coach­es and play­ers ought to pay at­ten­tion to this spe­cial skill.

T&T en­tered this game with much con­fi­dence af­ter such a sat­is­fy­ing per­for­mance against the might of Mex­i­co.

The slight changes in the start­ing team brought Daniel Cyrus in to re­place Aubrey David, while Abu Bakr re­turned to Cen­tral de­fense in place of Yohance Mashall.

For the first fifty min­utes, the change did not bear rel­e­vance to the qual­i­ty of play dur­ing the short pe­ri­od from the start.

Pana­ma de­cid­ed to pay re­spect to the new look War­riors, whom they had met some months ago and lit­er­al­ly dom­i­nat­ed the pro­ceed­ing in Trinidad.

Their as­sess­ment was cor­rect, in that Stephen Hart de­cid­ed to seek com­po­sure and me­thod­i­cal ap­proach in the ear­ly stages, where cau­tion must be a ma­jor fac­tor as a main in­gre­di­ent that all teams use in the Knock-out game sys­tem.

The from six play­ers ap­peared to be com­fort­able with a strong mid­field of Kheelem Hy­land in the back of Jo­evin jones, Kevon George, and Cordel Cato, a four­some which set the char­ac­ter of a pos­ses­sion game in the mid­field with some smooth tran­si­tions to cap­tain Ken­wayne Jones and new­com­er Ker­ron Cum­mings op­er­at­ing as twin strik­ers.

Pana­ma did not ap­pear dom­i­nant, nei­ther did they ap­pear to be in a hur­ry to at­tempt speedy at­tack­ing meth­ods. They chased the pass­es used by the war­riors as the ball was moved around lat­er­al­ly when there was no pres­sure, on­ly to make full use of the speedy wingers Jones and Cato. For fif­teen min­utes, Pana­ma looked un­cer­tain as to how they plan to deal with some chal­lenges to which they had not seen be­fore from T&T. As hap­pens so of­ten in cir­cum­stances where a team is gain­ing in con­fi­dence, an awk­ward slip by Abu bakr, fol­lowed by an at­tempt to cor­rect the er­ror by Shel­don Bateau, his cen­tral de­fend­ing part­ner. This turned out to be dis­as­trous as bateau's des­per­ate clear­ance, bounced off Teje­da, struck Bateau in the face and fell to the feet of Teje­da.

His ex­pe­ri­ence brought clin­i­cal ac­cu­ra­cy and com­po­sure as he quick­ly re­al­ized that Keep­er Mar­vin Phillips was strand­ed and could not de­fend against an ac­cu­rate push of the ball in­to the net.

My own im­pres­sion was that the set­back would on­ly be tem­po­rary, see­ing that Pana­ma was not re­al­ly in the game in the ear­ly pe­ri­od.

A se­ries of free­kicks and cor­ners went the way of the War­riors, but none mak­ing a pos­i­tive im­pact on the de­fense of Pana­ma.

The game was mov­ing to­wards the half time whis­tle with T&T still show­ing that they were ca­pa­ble of tak­ing con­trol of the game. A few half chances were not ac­cept­ed, main­ly through er­rors in the fi­nal pass­es.

With five min­utes to go in the first half, there was re­lent­less pres­sure put on by the war­riors, caus­ing some tough tack­les by Pana­ma as a way to off­set the at­tack­ing mode of their op­po­nents.

My half time ob­ser­va­tion was that Jones (K) was again en­joy­ing an­oth­er good game. His place­ment for cross­es was spot on and the ser­vices from the de­fense to him were well sup­port­ed by Cato on the right, George in the mid­dle and Jones (J) on the left.

It looked awe­some but un­pro­duc­tive in the first half and promised bet­ter in the sec­ond.

It ac­tu­al­ly was and Pana­ma did not ap­pear to be the force that they had shown pre­vi­ous­ly in their group match­es.

Free-kicks and cor­ners en­tered the fray against Pana­ma when they were de­fend­ing un­der pres­sure and just tak­ing eva­sive ac­tion.

In the end it was a very good match for T&T as it now looks for­ward to the 2018 World Cup qual­i­fi­ca­tion cam­paign.