Green gets kick out of Golden Boot race with Bygrave
DANIEL Green hit a brace to help inspire Mount Pleasant to a 4-1 home win over Tivoli Gardens at Drax Hall on Sunday.
Green. along with fellow striker Trivante Stewart, scored all four goals in the massive win which served as a confidence booster for the club.
The two goals took the striker up to 12 goals, one more than Atapaharoy Bygrave of Dunbeholden who had been leading the Golden Boot race almost all season.
And as the old adage “Make hay while the sun shines!” goes, Green did not waste the opportunity to take sole leadership of the Golden Boot race with Dubeholden idle this week, as Cavalier are away at the Caribbean Club Championships in the Dominican Republic.
“I feel very good because I was waiting for this moment to be on top of the league goalscoring charts,” he confessed.
The national representative also disclosed that he will have to revise his goals target for the season as he is now bearing down on the origianl one set at the start of the campaign.
“The target was 15 goals but right now it seems that I can go more, and I just have to continue scoring.”
Having surpassed Bygrave, Green has no intention of losing sight of the things that have kept him in the hunt for the prize of top striker in the JPL.
“When Atapharoy Bygrave was leading, that gave me a drive to go for a goal a game so I am just going to continue that focus,” he said.
Green also confessed that he has enjoyed the challenge posed by his Reggae Boy teammate since the season began.
“I am enjoying it very much because we are all football players and to see him scoring and me scoring at game time…we are just challenging each other.”
Even more important than the two goals on Sunday were the three points gained by fourth-place Mount Pleasant who were able to open up a small gap on the two teams closest to them in fifth and sixth positions.
“This game was really important to us because we needed these three points, even to protect ourselves from the group behind us.
“It was important to get closer to the top three and get away from the other two [Cavalier and Tivoli Gardens] so this was a must-win game for us, worst at home — we were going for it,” he stated.
After a mid-season slump which saw them give up leadership of the league and slip away from the top three, Green says that the momentum is returning to the Mount Pleasant team in concert with the return from injury of a number of first-team players.
“The injured players that were missing from our team are coming back right now so the momentum is building again,” he said.
The win took Mount Pleasant up to 34 points, seven more than fifth-place Cavalier and nine more than sixth-place Tivoli Gardens on Sunday.
— Dwayne Richards