Keon Rus­sell lift­ed T&T to its fifth con­sec­u­tive win at the Amer­i­c­as Net­ball Men’s Cham­pi­onships in St Kitts and Nevis on Mon­day (Sep­tem­ber 16) night.

And for that the shoot­er was named the “Most Valu­able Play­er” for the team af­ter scor­ing 18 goals from 29 at­tempts to guide the na­tion­al men’s team to a 47-25 vic­to­ry over Grena­da at the Pam Tyson Net­ball Com­plex in St Kitts. The eight-team tour­na­ment is be­ing played at two venues, the oth­er is the Ci­ce­ly Grell Hull Do­ra Stevens Com­plex in Nevis.

Rus­sell opened as the goal-shoot­er and com­bined with cap­tain goal-at­tack Steve Mc Sween to give T&T an 11-8 lead at the end of the first quar­ter. In the sec­ond pe­ri­od, Rus­sell was switched to the goal-at­tack po­si­tion and coach Pietra Gay brought in Ker­ry McMil­lan as goal-shoot­er.

McMil­lan spent most of the quar­ter feed­ing his goal-at­tack as they com­bined to take T&T to a dou­ble-dig­it lead at the half, 24-13 while goal-keep­er Daniel Ha­gley and goal-de­fence Kevin Ed­wards lim­it­ed the Grena­di­ans tries at goal. They had great sup­port from wing-de­fence Shaquille Lewis in the first quar­ter, who was then re­placed by Chris­t­ian Arthur for the next two pe­ri­ods be­fore he was put in the goal-de­fence po­si­tion.

In the sec­ond half, the lo­cal team con­tin­ued to dom­i­nate on both of­fence and de­fence. Rus­sell, still in the goal-at­tack bib, then part­nered with goal-shoot­er Dex­troy Man­swell who con­tin­ued to shoot with great ac­cu­ra­cy through­out the Cham­pi­onship, hit­ting eight from 10 (80 per cent) to kept T&T ahead at the close of the third quar­ter.

Coach Gay brought back in her open­ing shoot­ing pair, Rus­sell and Mc Sween and they were un­stop­pable on the of­fence while de­fend­ers Ha­gley and Arthur were im­pen­e­tra­ble down the oth­er end.

The shoot­ing duo went on to score 15 goals in the fi­nal pe­ri­od while the de­fend­ers re­strict­ed Grena­da to five as the un­de­feat­ed T&T eased to the 22-goal win to add to their four oth­er vic­to­ries against the host team (56-27), USA (48-14), St Vin­cent and the Grenadines (54-37) and An­tigua and Bar­bu­da (87-16).

T&T was sched­uled to face fel­low un­beat­en team Ja­maica Tues­day (Sep­tem­ber 17) evening be­fore its fi­nal match of the round-robin com­pe­ti­tion against Eng­land Wednes­day (Sep­tem­ber 18) at 4.30 pm.

Re­sults

T&T 47 (Keon Rus­sell 18/29, Steve Mc­Sween 21/25, Dex­troy Man­swell 8/10) vs Grena­da 25 (S Bap­tiste 21/30, K Hinds 4/10, L Alexan­der 0/4). Quar­ter scores: 1st 11-8, 2nd 24-13, 3rd 32-20 (All in favour of T&T). MVP - Keon Rus­sell (Goal-shoot­er/goal at­tack)

St Vin­cent and the Grenadines 75 vs USA 22

St Kitts and Nevis 14 vs Eng­land 70

An­tigua and Bar­bi­u­da 14 vs Ja­maica 83

Wednes­day’s match­es

Court 1: T&T vs Eng­land, 4.30 pm; Ja­maica vs SVG, 6.30 pm

Court 2: ATG vs USA, 4.40 pm; Grena­da vs SKN, 6.40 pm

Clos­ing and pre­sen­ta­tions, 8.15 pm.