Troy Parrott scored a hat-trick as AZ Alkmaar hammered troubled Dutch giants Ajax 6-0 in the KNVB Cup round of 16.<\/p>\n
With Republic of Ireland manager Heimir Hallgr\u00edmsson in attendance in Alkmaar, Parrott served a timely reminder to the Ireland boss of his ability ahead of the March World Cup qualifier against the Czech Republic.<\/p>\n
Parrott opened the scoring for Alkmaar after just three minutes when he was quickest to react to a rebound from a long-range shot which had been parried by former St Patrick’s Athletic goalkeeper Viteszlav Jaros.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old doubled his side’s lead on 33 minutes with a wonderfully simplistic goal, using all his strength and pace.<\/p>\n
Parrott chased down a long clearance from Alkmaar goalkeeper Rome-Jayden Owusu-Oduro. His first touch was a header to take the ball away from his marker and his second was a powerful shot which nestled in the far right corner.<\/p>\n
Alkmaar all but ended the game as a contest before the break when Peer Koopmeiners made it 3-0, while things got even worse for Ajax two minutes into the second half, with Kees Smit getting in on the scoring.<\/p>\n
Parrott claimed the match ball and made sure that he would be the man of the match with 10 minutes to go when he completed his hat-trick, showing his goalscoring instincts when he was in the right place at the right time to side-foot the ball into an empty net after a shot had come back off the post.<\/p>\n
Ibrahim Sadiq piled further misery on Ajax when he made it 6-0 with two minutes left on the clock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Troy Parrott scored a hat-trick as AZ Alkmaar hammered troubled Dutch giants Ajax 6-0 in the KNVB Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-245105","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}