Mendonca satisfied with success of Guyoil Tournament

With the dust already settled and a winner declared, the organizers of the Guyoil/Tradewind Tankers Under-18 Schools Football tournament have deemed the competition a success.
The eleven-week competition had seen the inclusion of twelve secondary school teams from around Georgetown, East and West Coast Demerara, and Linden in a league format — an arrangement that has been attempted for the first time at the school level.
To this end, Petra Co-Director Troy Mendonca sees the inaugural league as the making of history.
“Well, for me, history has been created. I might be wrong, but from my playing time a couple of decades ago, I can’t recall having a school league being played,” Mendonca stated.
Mendonca also said that tedious planning was injected into the implementation phase. As such, the tournament’s success is even more gratifying for the organization, because of the platform it gives young players to showcase their skills.
“And we at Petra, we fought hard to have this; it was a part of our vision. And to reach this end, where we had three teams vying for top honours on the last day, you know, it speaks volumes for what this tournament and this format can do,” he said.
Looking towards the near future, Mendonca is of the opinion that the top two Guyoil teams — Annandale Secondary and Christianburg Wismar Secondary — are perfectly poised to do well in the KFC Goodwill tournament.
“You know, we set it up like this so as to have a good gauge as to where we’re at in terms of our football; because both teams (Annandale and Christianburg- Wismar) now going into the competition have played 11 weeks of football, they’re peaking right now. So that in itself will give us a gauge as to where we’re at, and an indication of where we’ll go from here as a footballing nation,” he explained.
The organizer has placed confidence in the Annai Team’s abilities. “We planned this tournament last year, and we extended an invitation to Annai because they were the defending champions in that area; so we didn’t change that, and we hope they’ll give a very good account for themselves,” he said.
While noting that the Trinidadian Shiva Boys Hindu College will make a good representation of a school team from another country, Mendonca assured that the KFC Goodwill tournament, slated to kick off this Saturday, is going to be another successful one.