THE Calvert Fitzgerald-coached outfit Rivoli United, currently the lone representative from the parish of St Catherine in this year’s Red Stripe Premier League (RSPL), have been saddled with the mantle of providing the parish with full and capable representation.

This they have accepted gladly, but the effort is expected to come from a small but capable band of pilgrims who are at present working feverishly under the watchful eyes of coaches Fitzgerald, Oneil Thompson and Dwight Heron in their preparation to become fully competitive for this season.

The Jamaica Observer caught up with coach Fitzgerald at the club’s Monk Street playing facility on Tuesday morning while taking his players through their paces along with his assistant coaches Thompson, a former Waterhouse player, and Heron, formerly of multiple Premier League winners Tivoli Gardens.

Heron also spent two and one half seasons with Rivoli United shortly after they made their first appearance in the country’s top football league in the early 2000s.

Fitzgerald, one of the finest football coaches in the country and a proverbial optimist in his undertakings, is at present looking towards continuing the challenge from where Rivoli United left off last season, even in the face of some stiff challenges from inadequate resources.

Nonetheless, the proverbial optimist sees “the prospect of the team doing well is fair. Last season, if all the facts were to be told, we had a pretty good season where we finished at the top half of the table. We had a very good first round, but could only muster five points in the second as we fell away a bit at that stage of the competition. We were, however, not daunted by the circumstances and for the third round we regrouped, gathered our wits about us, then buckled down to some serious damage control efforts that saw us progressing to 10 games unbeaten to finish at the top half of the table.”

In the interim, though, due to financial constraints Rivoli have lost four of their key players with the major loss being Devon Hodges, the team’s top goal poacher, and top central midfielder, Raymond Williams. Both to Humble Lion, while Davian Garrison and Barrington Price have moved back to Tivoli Gardens.

Their departure was lamented by Fitzgerald, seeing that those four players were among the starters in the team’s mercurial run in the third round of last season’s RSPL when they progressed from 10th place to finish sixth.

“I was anticipating that we would lose players to the more affluent clubs who can afford to pay the players and the players themselves, too, will want to maximise on their earnings. We therefore moved early to put things in place that would seek to fill the breach by acquiring the services of a number of young players who were just waiting in the wings for the right opportunity to put their skills on show in the big league.

“They are shaping promisingly and we the coaching staff will just have to wait and see how they will adjust with time to the rigours of play and how comfortable they are in the game at the level of Premier League football,” Fitzgerald said.

“At this point in our preparation, even though we might not have like-for-like replacements, we certainly have players who have shown an eagerness to step up to the plate and now given the opportunity should embrace it with both hands and for this I am looking forward for a good season.” One such player is new signing Kemar Beckford from Frazsier’s Whip, whom the coach is expecting a lot of quality play from.

“I personally think that he is a very good signing. Beckford, to my mind, was one of the better players in the country who was not playing in the Red Stripe Premier League and will now do so for us at Rivoli United.”

Beckford, according to Fitzgerald, was being hounded by a number of the top Premier League clubs for his signature, “so we consider ourselves fortunate to have won his signature”.