The exciting ISSA Champions Cup, the island’s premier high school knockout football competition, began on Friday at Sabina Park with a cracking doubleheader.

Defending champions Kingston College (KC) were ousted by last year’s losing finalists St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) 6-5 in sudden-death penalties in the feature match, after 2015 champions St George’s College (STGC) had eased to a 2-0 victory over Garvey Maceo in the curtain-raiser.

The wins for St George’s College and STETHS see them get their names in the draw for the quarter-final round which will be played next weekend.

STGC head coach Neville Bell could not hide his delight in advancing beyond the first round of the competition, having failed to make the cut last season.

“I am happy we got the victory. we thought we would do well on this surface and we did. I am impressed with Garvey Maceo; I think they tried to play good football. We are so happy that we got the victory, the first one out of the way. we are still in two competitions, we still have a chance to win three titles and this is what we want,” he noted.

Bell believes his team’s chances of winning the title are just as good as any, but he is wary of the quality of the opposition in this particular competition.

“I think we are capable of going all the way. certainly we are, but there are some really good teams in this competition, so now we are down to the final eight. We don’t know who we are playing yet or where we will play but this is what we want. We have some quality youngsters and I pray it works for us for sure,” he said.

Merron Gordon admitted that going behind to a second-minute goal was a killer blow for his Garvey Maceo team.

“When you concede an early goal it is always going to be a problem. We should have done better, even in the phase just after that and we got a beautiful chance late in the first half to bring it back to 2-1. I think if we had, we would have done much better,” Gordon reasoned.

Having come so close to winning the title by making it to the final last year before being swept aside 3-0 by KC, STETHS head coach Omar Wedderburn came to Sabina Park with a no-nonsense approach to getting past the defending champions.

“One of our game plans today (Friday) was to keep cool, calm and collected because we were taking a crocodile approach to the game, meaning, we plan to come out here and play them with all the aggression that we have,” Wedderburn explained.

“We planned to come and win this game no matter what — this was our game plan. They were the champions, so we go one goal up, half-time it is only fair for them to really come and give what they got and they got back a goal. But our concentration was on winning this game and we did that.”

STETHS failed to make it to the final four of the ISSA/Wata DaCosta Cup competition so all their focus is ultimately on becoming the first rural area team to win the all-island knockout championships.

Wedderburn, however, is not looking towards the final just yet, but insists it will be a game by game approach to getting their hands on the sparkling new trophy.

“We are taking it step by step, we are not planning on winning any silverware as yet. We are planning about the next game because we cannot jump two hurdles at a time, so we are just taking it game by game, stage by stage,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ludlow Bernard praised the efforts of his boys in their defence of the title, while crediting a quality opposition that troubled his team early on.

“We went down 1-0 early; we were under some very good attacks from a good STETHS team. We made some adjustments in the middle, but probably a little too late and they would have scored. We fixed that situation and we thought that we would have been able to get our goals from off the flanks.

“We rolled the dice, we tried our luck, we got an equaliser, and I thought we got some very good look-ins. We probably should have scored and then it went down to the dreaded penalty kicks.

“I thought all the players were very valiant in this kind of defeat, so I don’t think there is anything lost here today because we didn’t lose the game in 90 minutes,” Bernard said.

Kingston College have advanced to the semi-finals of the ISSA/Digicel Manning Cup and will now turn their attention to ending a three-decade drought in that competition.

— Dwayne Richards