Trinidad and To­ba­go's Na­tion­al Un­der 20 foot­ballers ral­lied back with two goals in in­jury time to earn a 2-2 draw with St Vin­cent and the Grenadines U-20s in a warm up en­counter in Vic­to­ria on Fri­day. The Zo­ran Vranes-coached team trav­eled to SVG last week to play two match­es. The first game on Wednes­day end­ed 1-1 with Mikeil Williams scor­ing an own goal in the 72nd minute af­ter strik­er Ja­mal Gay had opened the scor­ing for T&T in the 5th minute.

The sec­ond out­ing saw T&T dom­i­nate pro­ceed­ings but fall be­hind in the 65th minute through a penal­ty an then in the 85th minute Williams was the un­for­tu­nate scor­er of an­oth­er own goal.

T&T kept the pres­sure on the hosts and pulled a goal back in the 91st minute when a Mar­vin Man­swell cross was turned in by a St Vin­cent de­fend­er. And a minute lat­er, Gay pow­ered a shot goal­wards which the goal­keep­er par­tial­ly blocked be­fore Shel­don Bateau buried the re­bound in­to the left cor­ner for the equalis­er.

St Vin­cent is prepar­ing for a fi­nal Caribbean round with Ja­maica, Haiti and Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic in Jan­u­ary from which the win­ning team will ad­vance to the CON­CA­CAF Fi­nals in T&T in March, 2009.

The T&T team will re­sume train­ing on De­cem­ber 28 with sev­er­al of the US Col­lege based play­ers re­join­ing the squad lat­er this month. They in­clude strik­er Stephen Knox, mid­field­er Sean D Sil­va, goal­keep­er Jesse Fuller­ton, Chike Sul­li­van and US-born play­er Bradley Welsh.

An­oth­er US-born play­er, Nicholas De Leon, is al­so el­i­gi­ble to rep­re­sent T&T. The young strik­er is the son of for­mer T&T great Leroy De Leon. De Leon(N) is at­tached to the Cis­co Foot­ball Club and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Neva­da, Las Ve­gas. Na­tion­al U-20 team man­ag­er Chris D Sil­va al­so men­tioned that the door will re­main open to play­ers who can bring added val­ue to the cur­rent team.

He re­vealed too that past Na­tion­al U-17 play­ers Robert Primus and Kevin Moli­no, both at­tached to Cli­co San Juan Jabloteh were not con­sid­ered for re­cent se­lec­tion be­cause they start­ed miss­ing train­ing ses­sions some months ago. T&T are al­so card­ed to un­der­go a ten-day train­ing camp in Sao Pao­lo, Brazil from Jan­u­ary 15-25.

The eight-team CON­CA­CAF fi­nals in March will qual­i­fy four teams for the U-20 World Cup in Egypt, due to take place from Sep­tem­ber 25-Oc­to­ber 16, 2009.

Six teams al­ready have qual­i­fied for. Cana­da, Mex­i­co and the Unit­ed States will be joined by host T&T and Cen­tral Amer­i­can sides Cos­ta Ri­ca and El Sal­vador plus one oth­er Caribbean

rep­re­sen­ta­tive.