HONIARA – Tenakoga and Florence Young schools will represent the Solomon Islands in New Caledonia at the U’12 Festival of Football in May this year.
Tenakoga and Florence Young were the top two sides out of the 30 that entered the SIFF U’12 tournament at the SIFF academy which ended yesterday.
Tenakoga defeated Florence Young 1-0 in the final in front of hundreds of fans from both schools.
The East Guadalcanal School scored the winner in the second half of the final and sent their enthusiastic supporters into great celebrations.
Both teams had already secured their spot in the tournament in New Caledonia though there was still a lot of emotion surrounding the match.
Tenakoga team manager and deputy school principal (primary) Denson Tanito was full of praise for his team.
“I did not expect my team to come this far having only been put together for a week prior to the competition,” he said. “I’m very excited.”
Florence Young coach, Ronney Bana was philosophical about the result in accepting defeat.
Meanwhile, Marist scooped the third place trophy and Koloale School of Excellence settled for fourth after it defeated Kossa School of Excellence in the playoff.
Other consolation prizes included the golden boot award won by Marist’s Kevin Iroga while ‘Best and Fairest’ award went to Chung Wah School.
President Martin Alufurai has praised all the participating schools, their teachers and parents for making the competition a success.
Alufurai said there is an abundance of soccer talents among boys and girls and his federation will ensure more competitions are organized so that these talents are nurtured for future national teams.
He challenged the children to look beyond the competition with the aim to represent the country one day in the Under 17, 20, 23 and senior teams.
Alufurai told them the competition which ended yesterday was to determine teams to represent Solomon Islands at the Oceania Football Confederation Football Festival however, it should not end there.
“I want the two teams to set themselves another goal to go to New Caledonia and try and qualify for the Danone Cup championship in France.”
