De­spite a dou­ble strike from Aki­no­la Gre­go­ry, T&T’s beach soc­cer team went down 4-1 from the penal­ty spot in their open­ing match of the CON­CA­CAF Beach Soc­cer World Cup Qual­i­fiers at the Mal­colm Park Beach Soc­cer Fa­cil­i­ty in Nas­sau, Ba­hamas on Tuesday.

Coach Chad Ap­poo’s men have nev­er made it to the semi­fi­nals and with a new for­mat that en­abled the top eight teams in the CON­CA­CAF re­gion to progress to the semi­fi­nals, the T&T ballers need­ed just to fin­ish among the top two teams for a place among the top four.

USA, the top team in the re­gion, en­tered the match af­ter a con­vinc­ing 5-0 vic­to­ry over their coun­ter­parts the last time the teams met, but yes­ter­day T&T threat­ened to change that ear­ly when Kevon “Show­time” Wood­ley’s goal­ward shot from goal­keep­er Jabari Gray’s quick re­lease, could not be di­rect­ed in­to the goal by Jor­dan Ri­ley just a minute af­ter the game start­ed.

Ri­ley’s awk­ward touch sent the ball ag­o­nis­ing­ly wide of the tar­get, with the US goal­keep­er Christo­pher Toth to­tal­ly beat­en. But from an al­most im­me­di­ate re­sponse, Toth found Alessan­dro Canale lurk­ing on top of the T&T goal area, and though he was quick­ly closed down, the stocky Amer­i­can skill­ful­ly took the ball on his chest be­fore ex­e­cut­ing a bi­cy­cle kick that flew past Gray in the T&T goal for the open­er.

The T&T men were any­thing but daunt­ed by the ear­ly US ad­van­tage and found the equalis­er soon af­ter. This time, Ri­ley with a rasp­ing shot that was stopped by Toth, but Toth could not stop the on­rush­ing Gre­go­ry, us­ing his strength to hold off the de­fend­er, be­fore hit­ting the ball in­to the emp­ty net for the 1-1 score­line.

Both teams at­tacked each oth­er in the mo­ments that fol­lowed but Ri­ley, though ad­mired for his fight­ing spir­it ear­ly, was guilty of too much ag­gres­sion, when he brought down Gabriel Sil­veira in the penal­ty area for which the ref­er­ee point­ed to the penal­ty spot.

Sil­veira made no mis­take from the penal­ty spot by send­ing Gray the wrong di­rec­tion to re­store the one-goal ad­van­tage for the USA 2-1. Still, there were no signs of sur­ren­der from the T&T men. And with three min­utes and 30 sec­onds to go in the third pe­ri­od of play, Gre­go­ry got his sec­ond goal of the match and T&T’s equalis­er when he robbed the de­fend­er of the ball and struck it pow­er­ful­ly past Toth.

The teams could not sep­a­rate them­selves in the mo­ments that fol­lowed but the USA lat­er sealed the win 4-1 scor­ing all four kicks from An­dres Navas, Sil­veira, Nicholas Perea and Canale. Ri­ley was the lone scor­er for T&T, as both Kevon Williams and An­der­son Pe­ters saw their at­tempts saved.