The best teams and players clash today for championship honours when the seventh Diamond Mineral Water International Hockey Festival concludes today at the National Gymnasium.
The tournament, which bullied off on Thursday, has seen intense rivalries among local and overseas teams.
However, semi-final matchups in three categories – Men’s, Women’s and Veterans – will be closely contested battles in all departments.
As it is at the moment, local teams Hikers and Old Fort go into today’s matches at the top of their groups while Trinidad & Tobago’s Malvern and Georgetown Cricket Club (GCC) Hockey Club were the runners up. However, Hikers will come up against GCC while Old Fort takes on Malvern.
In the Women’s category, top seed Flora GCC battle Hikers and Malvern challenge Bokra. In the Veterans’ draw number one side Fatima will take fourth place Hikers and second place GCC will tackle Old Old Fort. Meanwhile, yesterday Kerensa Fernandes’ 28th minute strike separated Malvern from Flora GCC. However, Old Old Fort was not so fortunate in their encounter against Fatima, who beat them 8-1.
Nicholas Wren netted in the 5th, 10th, 14th, 36th and 12th minutes for Fatima while support came from Shawn Tang in the 21st and 22nd minutes and Gerard Mohabir in 15th minute. There was another rout when GCC dispatched of ABC of T&T in a Veterans’ game. Orlon Semple (6th, 39th, 40th) scored a hat-trick of goals, Kevin Spencer (4th and 39th) scored two and Dwayne Scott (7th) and Shaka Gill (31st) scored one apiece; Philip Fernandes, playing as a guess player, scored the consolation goal for ABC.
The national Under-21 side, Supernova, suffered another heavy defeat when they lost to Malvern 7-3. Wayne Legerten led the scoring with three goals in the 27th, 31st and 36th minutes, Tariq Mareano in the 13th and 14th minutes while Jonathan Warren and Darryl Hume netted in the 15th and 22nd minutes respectively.
Tamarj Assanah (5th), Mark Sargeant (14th) and Eric Hing (26th) were the scorers for Supernova.
