T&T strik­er Levi Gar­cia and his AEK Athens com­plete the do­mes­tic dou­ble in the 2022/2023 Greece Foot­ball sea­son when they blanked PAOK FC 2-0 fi­nal of the Greece Novi­bet Cup fi­nal at the Pan­thes­sa­liko Sta­di­um, Vo­los, on Wednesday.

The out­come was not as easy as the fi­nal score­line would sug­gest though as from ear­ly as the sixth minute, re­cent­ly crowned Greece Su­per League cham­pi­ons for the 13th time, AEK Athens was re­duced to ten men when Lazaros Ra­to was shown a straight red card.

De­spite be­ing a man down, AEK Athens still went ahead in the 26th minute via Harold Mouk­ou­di while Gar­cia was re­placed in the 61st minute by Nordin Am­ra­bat, with Pao­lo Fer­nan­des adding an in­sur­ance item two min­utes in­to time added-on, to seal a 2-0 tri­umph and a 16th Cup win, its first since the 2015/2016 sea­son.

It was al­so the third Stoix­i­man Greece Su­per League and Novi­bet Cup dou­ble for AEK Athens to add to their pre­vi­ous sweeps in the 1938/1939 and 1977/1978 sea­sons.

Ear­li­er this month, the 25-year-old Gar­cia and his team­mates clinched a 13th do­mes­tic league crown with a 4-0 win over Vo­los FC on the fi­nal match day to end with 83 points, five ahead of Panathi­naikos as both teams qual­i­fied for the Eu­ro­pean Cham­pi­ons League while last year’s cham­pi­ons Olympia­cos fin­ished in the third spot with 73 points and qual­i­fied to the UE­FA Eu­ropa League while PAOK and Aris, the fourth and fifth-place fin­ish­ers with 67 and 51 points re­spec­tive­ly qual­i­fied for the UE­FA Con­fer­ence League with Vo­los FC sixth with 40 points.

The San­ta Flo­ra-born Gar­cia, who end­ed the sea­son with 14 league goals, sec­ond in the ‘Gold­en Boot’ race to Olympia­cos’ Cedric Bakam­bu of the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Re­pub­lic of Con­go by four goals and is ru­moured to be want­ed by no few­er than 14 Eu­ro­pean clubs ahead of the sum­mer trans­fer win­dow led his past Olympia­cos 4-2 on ag­gre­gate in their home-and-away semi­fi­nal, scor­ing a dou­ble in the first-leg 3-0 win.