Devonshire Cougars 1

North Village 5

Keishen Bean scored a hat-trick as North Village preserved their Premier Division status with a comfortable win over Devonshire Cougars last night.

Village have never been relegated from the top flight and needed to win to ensure they kept that enviable record intact.

In the end they did so with ease, with Demetre Daniels and Pierre Smith also scoring against a Cougars side who already appeared to have left for the summer in mind, if not in body.

“It was the only way to end the season, we couldn’t afford anything else,” Ralph Bean Jr, the Village player/coach, said. “We had to talk about the elephant in the room [relegation] before the game, but the only way to face challenges is head on.”

Given the task facing them it was understandable that Village were the more nervous of the two sides, with Cougars playing for nothing more than pride. That showed in the approach, and the reaction of Devrae Tankard, whose defence-splitting pass created the first goal for Keishen Bean.

Tankard was given too much time on the ball and that lackadaisical approach to defending was a recurring theme for Cougars last night, and too often the home side failed to clear a ball properly, if at all. The sight of Daniel Johnson, the goalkeeper, diving over Daniels’s shot for Village’s second, and Kijuan Franks missing the ball entirely in the build up to Bean’s third, largely summed up Cougars’ performance.

“Nerves are always going to be an issue in any game, but this was a historical type of situation, or could have been, so I knew the nerves were there and the first goal definitely settled us. All kudos to my captain Keishen Bean, he came through when we needed him, it was a good hat-trick.”

Cougars, meanwhile, only had Machi Battersbee’s first-half effort to show for their night’s work, but Andrew Bascome refused to be too hard on his players. The Cougars coach said that he thought the time he spent preparing the national team had an impact his team’s readiness. His only complaint was the lack of concentration the home side showed in the final 20 minutes, when the game was as good as over.

“It looks like we kind of gave up and you don’t do those things, you’ve got to play right to the end, regardless,” Bascome said.