Baboucarr Steve Trawally has scored yet another CSL hat trick, his first for his new side Guizhou Hengfeng in a 4 – 3 away defeat to Beijing Guoan on Sunday evening.
The Gambian International forward, who was voted The Gambia’s best foreign-based player of the year 2017/18 at the sports award gala hosted by the Sports Journalist Association of The Gambia last friday, was unstoppable for Guizhou despite the defeat.
Remarkably, the former Real de Banjul prodigy almost completed a come back for Guizhou after replicating the hat trick he scored against the same opposition last season while at Yanbian Funde, after clawing Guizhou from 3 goals down to finish the game 4-3 in favour of Beijing.
The game started terribly for Gregorio Manzano and his side, when they fell behind to the Beijing side 6 minutes into the game at the Workers stadium, following Jonathan Viera’s header from close range, from a set play.
Things then went from bad to worse after Viera added a second in the 18th minute before Ba Dun made it 3, seven minutes later in the 26th minute. At that point it was game over for the hapless visitors, who were utterly dejected and downcast and took them up to the 36th minute mark to have any glimmer of hope to salvage any result from the game, when 23-year-old Steve fired in the first of his hat trick from six yards out to finish the first half 3 -1, following cross from Wang Fan.
But like they began in the first half, Beijing restored their deficit almost immediately after the half-time break, when Renato Augusto set-up Cederic Bakambu in the 48th minute to take the game to 4-1. Steve then pulled a second for the visitors in the 75th minute to revive their hopes, before firing in his third two minutes later in the 77th minute, which almost turned the game on its head and gave Beijing a twitchy finale in the end, although the Guizhou side could not complete the comeback.
The hat trick was Steve’s third in the last 7 away games in the CSL, dating back to October last year, when he scored his second hat trick for Yanbian against Guangzhou Evergrande, which followed another hat trick from the Gambian flyer a month earlier against this afternoon’s opposition, Beijing Guoan.
This afternoon’s hat trick has now taken his goal tally this season to 6 goals in 8 games. However, it’s really ironic, Steve who finished as the Chinese Super League’s 5th top scorer with 18 goals last season only to see his club Yanbian Funde relegated with 22 points after scoring 56% of their goals, ended up on the losing side in two of the three hattricks he has scored so far, and he must be feeling really let down by teammates. Already he has scored 55% of Hengfeng’s goals so far and already in the top 5 of the league’s goalscorers, but despite this, Henfeng have also dropped into the relegation zone after 8 games.
