A brace from Djoshua Cyrus of Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do, set Trinidad and To­ba­go’s (T&T) Un­der-15 foot­ballers off to a win­ning start in Group ‘S’ of the FI­FA Un­der-15 World Cup and Fes­ti­val at the Hov­san Com­pe­ti­tion Com­plex in Baku, Azer­bai­jan on Sat­ur­day.

Coach Ran­dolph Boyce's side were ex­pect­ed to pre­vail, and they did not dis­ap­point at the FI­FA-in­tro­duced de­vel­op­ment tour­na­ment, which saw the match re­duced to an eight-a-side af­fair and played on a small­er pitch for de­vel­op­ment pur­pos­es.

De­spite the short prepa­ra­tion time of two months, the Un­der-15s didn’t take long be­fore mak­ing their pres­ence felt in the con­test, as Cyrus, a key com­po­nent for the Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege team in the on­go­ing Sports Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (SporTT) Boys Pre­mier­ship Di­vi­sion of the Sec­ondary Schools Foot­ball League (SS­FL), snatched the ad­van­tage with a third-minute item.

The con­test, played at a faster pace as ex­pect­ed, had reached just the fifth minute when T&T dou­bled their ad­van­tage. This time Jaden Mar­celle, a house­hold name for Sig­nal Hill Sec­ondary on the sis­ter-isle, found the net.

St Kitts/Nevis didn’t play dead in the en­counter and were giv­en hope from Terique Berridge in the 16th minute, cut­ting the score in half 2-1. It was not the last word from the young So­ca War­riors, as they made sure of max­i­mum points, cour­tesy of Cyrus’ sec­ond item of the match, which came in the 35th minute, killing all hopes their coun­ter­parts had of com­ing away with a draw or a win.

There were al­so wins for Egypt and Iraq on the open­ing day in the group. The Egyp­tians ham­mered Macau 8-0, while Iraqis thrashed the Cay­man Is­lands 5-0. A day af­ter ar­riv­ing in Baku, Boyce told the me­dia he be­lieves his charges are ca­pa­ble of reach­ing far in the tour­na­ment, not­ing that con­cen­tra­tion for long pe­ri­ods and de­ci­sion-mak­ing were the two ar­eas that need­ed to be en­hanced if they were to do so.

Boyce’s charges will play two match­es to­day. In the first game, they face Iraq at 10:15 am Baku time, which is 2:15 am T&T time. And in the oth­er game, the ju­nior War­riors will square off against the Cay­man Is­lands at 5 pm Baku time, which is 9 am T&T time.

The his­toric com­pe­ti­tion forms part of FI­FA’s ex­pand­ed com­mit­ment to youth foot­ball de­vel­op­ment and, for its in­au­gur­al edi­tion, will be open to boys’ teams from FI­FA Mem­ber As­so­ci­a­tions around the world. FI­FA has con­firmed that the event will be staged in a cen­tralised lo­ca­tion in Azer­bai­jan and de­signed specif­i­cal­ly around the de­vel­op­men­tal needs of un­der-15 play­ers.

T&T TEAM

Malachi Leach, Soren Shade, Ji­air Nan­ton, Zaa’van Joseph, Jay­lon Car­ring­ton, Gabriel Man­soor, Ar­mani Delph, Aaden Jones, Ryan Francette, Jaden Mar­celle, Haseem Sa­landy, Ke­mani By­ron, Djoshua Cyrus, and Samuel Ho­sein.