Two unan­swered goals from Pe­ru's Solange Alon­so and Ma­ri­na Montes in the sec­ond and third quar­ters, re­spec­tive­ly, as­sured Pe­ru the top spot in the fi­nal of the Pan Amer­i­can Hock­ey Chal­lenge in Li­ma, Pe­ru against T&T, on Sat­ur­day.

How­ev­er, the re­sult did not pre­vent the T&T women from earn­ing a qual­i­fy­ing berth at next year's Pan Am Cup in San­ti­a­go, Chile, by virtue of their tri­umph on Fri­day against Paraguay.

T&T women coached by An­tho­ny Mar­cano need­ed to win their se­mi-fi­nal match against the Paraguayans to se­cure one of the last two re­main­ing spots for the Pan Am Cup sched­uled from Jan­u­ary 20-30, 2022 in Chile.

The eight teams to qual­i­fy to the Pan Am Cup are the six high­est ranked teams from the pre­vi­ous Pan Am Cup, while the host coun­try (Chile) qual­i­fied as host. That left the top two teams from the Pan Am Chal­lenge to fill the fi­nal spots.

But yes­ter­day, the women in red, white and black strug­gled to find the form that en­abled them to beat the Pe­ru­vians 1-0 in an ear­li­er match of the tour­na­ment.

The Pe­ru­vians lift­ed them­selves from a goal­less first-quar­ter score to take the ad­van­tage with four min­utes left in the sec­ond quar­ter, when Alon­zo ben­e­fit­ed from a well queued-up ball from a penal­ty cor­ner and lashed it hard past de­fend­er Sha­ni­ah De Fre­itas whose stand­ing po­si­tion pre­vent­ed goal­keep­er Ar­resia Sandy from hav­ing a chance to save.

T&T's chances were bugged by a steady Pe­ru­vian de­fence there­after, en­abling the teams to re­turn to the dress­ing rooms with the score at 1-0 in Pe­ru's favour.

At the re­sump­tion of the third ses­sion, the T&T girls looked more pur­pose­ful in at­tack. Any­time they moved for­ward, how­ev­er, the Pe­ru­vians pegged them back with steady de­fen­sive work and quick counter-at­tacks.

T&T did not look too bad in the de­fence ei­ther, de­spite the lone goal that caused a few dropped jaws, but then a de­fen­sive blun­der in the 44th minute placed them on the brink of sur­ren­der. Alon­zo, got some room to run on top the 'D' and her shot found the stick of an un­marked Montes who on­ly had to guide the ball past Sandy for a 2-0 lead go­ing in­to the fi­nal quar­ter.

T&T could have equalised in the fi­nal quar­ter, but need­ed some luck.

From a penal­ty cor­ner, Aman­da George set it nice­ly for Gi­ann Sealy to hit pow­er­ful­ly to­wards goal and air­borne, but the ball de­flect­ed off the stick of Gretell Mejia and flew over the goal­post.

From the re­sult­ing cor­ner, cap­tain Amie Olton came up and drilled it hard and low, ag­o­nis­ing­ly wide of the post. It was an ef­fort that summed up T&T's night on the pitch, one of mis­for­tunes.