Kwan stars as TT whip Swiss

TT (No. 33 in the world) started off cautiously and against a team ranked three places ahead of them and against the run of play, Switzerland’s Jan Hodle opened the scoring with a scrappy goal to give the Europeans the lead in the 5th minute.

This instantly sparked some life and urgency into the hosts and they thought they had found the equaliser in the 7th minute but the goal was disallowed. One minute later, though, TT ’s Stefan Mouttete tied the match from a penalty corner. Teague Marcano could have given TT the lead but failed to score after receiving a slick through ball from Mickell Pierre to end the first quarter.

The second period saw the 39 year old Browne roll back the years in one of the best individual performances of the tournament so far. In the 26th minute, he started a weaving run into the box, getting past three defenders, and slipped it to Marcus James who fired the hosts ahead with his second goal of the tournament. Within two minutes, Browne, TT ’s most capped player with 304 matches, scored two flick shots in the 27th and 28th off penalty corners to extend the lead to 4-1 at half-time.

There was high intensity in the second half with end-to-end action and Tariq Marcano extended the red, white and black’s advantage in the 37th minute from another penalty corner to push the lead to 5-1.

History was also made in the quarter as the three Emmanuel brothers (Keiron, Kristien and Kwasi) joined the Marcano brothers (Tariq and Teague) on the field.

Swiss captain Patrick Muller managed to score a consolation goal in the 50th minute to make it 5-2 but that score lasted until the 59th when Shaquille Daniel slotted home from a fine counter-attacking move to complete the victory.

Speaking after the game, TT defender/midfielder Aidan de Gannes said, “Despite the result from the first game, the performance brought a lot of confidence to the team and carried over to this game and that was the difference.

The victory shouldn’t affect the team too much. Yes, it was nice to win and we celebrated the moment but I think we already started to refocus on the task at hand.” Sunday’s results: Pool A: USA 7 ( Pat Harris 10th, 50th Tyler Sundeen 11th , William Holt 20th , Aki Kaeppeler 28th, Nick Molcsan 39th, Amardeep Khokhar 57th vs Barbados 1 (Che Warner 53rd).

Pool A: Chile 1 (Fernando Renz 32nd) vs Canada 5 (Mark Pearson 40th, 44th, Gordon Johnston 41st, Keegan Pereira 47th, Scott Tupper 50th).

Pool B: Russia 1 (Alexander Skiperskiy 54th) vs Japan 3 (Kenta Tanaka 14th, 15th, Kentaro Fukuda 22nd).

Today’s matches: Switzerland vs Russia (1:15pm) USA vs Chile (3:30pm) Canada vs Barbados (5:45pm) Japan vs Trinidad and Tobago (8pm