The battle for places in the Delta Principals’ Cup competition for all secondary schools intensified from yesterday as the finals of the Local Government Areas preliminaries take centre stage between October 19 and Friday October 22with 50 teams competing for honours.
A total of 25 teams are expected to emerge from the finals of the preliminaries of the grassroot developmental football competition sponsored by Zenith Bank Plc.
Nine of the 25 Local Governments will decide their zonal qualifiers beginning from yesterday in various centres.
Local Government finals will take place at Isoko North, Oshimili North, Oshimili South, Patani, Sapele, Ughelli North, Uvwie, Warri South and Warri South West.
Other final matches will be decided on Thursday and Friday according to the fixtures released by the organizers.
Commissioner for Secondary School Education, Mrs. Rose Ezewu, has expressed delight over the standard of the tournament so far.
Ezewu said: “We are happy that from the preliminaries, we have seen fireworks from all the sides. The players are eager to show their talents to the world and we are happy with the turn out overall.
“This is an improvement on the past editions already. We expect more fireworks from the zonal stage of the competition but we are really happy things are turning out well in this edition.
“We thank our sponsors, Zenith Bank for standing behind us to put smiles on the faces of these young lads.”
The CEO of Hideaplus, organisers of the event, Tony Pemu, assured stakeholders that by weekend all the 25 zonal qualifiers would have emerged.
“We are doing so much to make this event special but somehow the players have also raised their game to boost the competition. They have shown so much hunger and zeal to be among the best. We are excited,” Pemu said.
