By Dean “The Sportsman” Greenaway
BVI beat St. Kitts and Nevis 2-1 in their opener
Despite falling to hosts Anguilla, 2-0 on Sunday night, a debuting BVI U14 Girls Football team finished second in a friendly weekend tournament, after beating St. Kitts and Nevis and Dominica by 2-1 scores respectively.
The weekend competition was a prep for the Aug 15-22, Caribbean Football Union Girls Challenge Series in Trinidad and Tobago.
T’Niyah Richardson scored in the 4th minute and Chelsie Dyer in the 26th as the BVI opened their 3-team friendlies, with a 2-1 victory over St. Kitts and Nevis on Friday night at the at the Raymond E. Guishard Technical Center.
On Saturday, Grace Tucker scored early Richardson scored her 2nd goal, then the BVI withstood the pressure from Dominica, for a 2-1 victory. Tucker gave BVI a 1-0 lead 3 minutes in and Richardson scored the winner in the 46th.
“BVI Girls played well. They fought, showed a lot of bravery, a lot of courage—they grew in the tournament,” noted BVIFA Women’s Development Director, Fitzgerald Carter told Island Sun sports. “They really played well, despite going down 2-0 in the final game against Anguilla—who I thought was the best team in the tournament and their program is ahead of ours—but our girls fought, they played hard, 0-0 in the first half and two set pieces cost us the game, but that’s football. All in all, the girls played really well.”
The opening victory, Carter pointed out, set the tone for the tournament and it helped the girls’ courage he said, noting that they got some understanding and recognized they could get it done and they also made friends. “They recognized that this is something I want to do, I want to be part of this and they started to believe more and they grew with confidence throughout the tournament,” he said. “I saw lots of good things from the tournament. We have lots to take into the CFU competition as it relates to defending. We showed that at times, we can be really difficult to score on and that is something very, very important. We made it difficult for the opponent to break us down, and can take that into the CFU competition—try to be known as a team who’s difficult to break down. That’s the part of our game we will be working on, so that will bring us success in the future.”
Of the goal scorers, Carter said that in training, Richardson had been complaining about striking the ball from a distance but kept practicing the technique and both goals came from goals came from running across the box, she had perfect technique and drove the ball into the back of the net. “The things she had been doing she executed in the game,” he noted. “I also like the fact that Grace Tucker—who recently started playing—and we encouraged her to come and continue playing. She said ‘coach, I’m now learning’ and I told her we trust you and we believe that you can learn to play this game. She scored on her second time ever playing the game and that was so fantastic for the team and everyone celebrated with her and that was very, very good to see.”
Wolues at CFU Club Shield
Wolues, the first BVI team to participate in the Caribbean Football Union Club Shield Series, fell to Suriname’s SV Transvaal, 3-0 after conceding two second half goals in Sunday’s game in Trinidad and Tobago.
“They’re a professional team, always training and more fit than us and they have very good technique as well,” noted Wolues Captain Phil Nelson. “We started with a little more defensive formation than we would play in the BVI and we were trying to restrict the spaces that they had.”
On Tuesday they lost to Barbados’ Weymouth Wales, 8-0. “We made a couple of mistakes to concede some first half goals,” Nelson noted. “A lot of the goals were individual mistakes—things we can learn from in the future to take into the BVI league and hopefully use to make our standard better.”
