Petra launches second annual futsal tournament

The Petra Organisation will host its second futsal tournament among community based teams in Georgetown, starting Monday, March 13. The Petra Organisation continues to make an impact on local football, this time taking the sport indoor for a futsal tournament at the National Gymnasium.

Despite having no sponsors for the tournament up to the point of the launching, the Petra Organisation decided to go ahead with the tournament because of the belief that football needs to be played at all levels.

Director of the Petra Organisation, Troy Mendonca at the launching of the tournament on Tuesday evening at Brandsville Hotel, shared Petra’s motivation to host the event. “Our organisation set ourselves a mandate to revitalise the sport in the school and in whatever way we see fit and coming out of our last venture we saw some areas where we can do that and in order for us to maintain what we plan to do with our input in football as a whole we will continue to run our programmes we set out. Even though we don’t have sponsors we have to run ahead with the tournament,” Mendonca noted.

However, the Petra Organisation is hopeful of getting sponsors onboard, especially after the success of the recently held Limacol Football Tournament.

“GT Beer was the sponsor of the first tournament, but at the moment we are currently engaged in talks with different sponsors, but we wanted to take advantage of this period where no football is being played besides the Elite League,” Mendonca highlighted.

In addition to the Elite league players having a bit of trouble playing in secondary tournaments such as this upcoming one, Mendonca cleared the air on the issue.

“We have not engaged anyone in talks about it, but that is something for the players to deal with. I know everybody wants to see the best play but if the Guyana Football Federation has a rule in place then we have no problem with it; we will have to abide by it,” Mendonca shared.

Nevertheless, Mendonca believes that most of the teams will be ready for the tournament on Monday, “All these teams, they just came off Guinness in the Streets, the Limacol and the Nations Cup so it’s just a matter of getting together for this tournament and I think they will be ready for Monday,” Mendonca mentioned.

Twenty-four (24) teams are expected to start the tournament with the winner set to receive $400,000, while second will collect $200,000. Third and fourth places will pocket $100,000 and $50,000 respectively.

The teams will play in a knockout round-robin to start the tournament and the remaining 16 teams will be divided into three groups of four for a round-robin group stage before the top two and the two best third place teams move onto the quarter-finals.

The tournament will be played at the National Gymnasium with action set to start at 19:00h on Monday, with the final scheduled for April 15.