May Day High enter their first-ever rural area Grace Headley Cup three-day cricket final brimming with confidence despite being pitted against schoolboy kingpins and champions St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS).

The encounter is set to start Tuesday at STETHS Sports Complex in Santa Cruz.

Since Principal Stanford Davis took charge of the Mandeville, Manchester-based May Day in 2009, he established a cricket programme and guided its steady growth until the 2022-2023 batch of players sensationally broke the semi-finals barrier.

And judging by the principal’s demeanour, the Oral Simpson-coached boys have nothing to lose.

“It’s a dream that we’ve had … and we were set back by COVID-19 [restrictions] so we never expected to reach the final this quickly, even though the boys told me from the beginning they are going to get there,” Davis told the Jamaica Observer on Monday.

“We’ve had players for the last five or six years, they have been with us since first form and they are home-bred, all from Manchester. They keep improving each year and people sometimes say that’s because other teams are weak, but now we are in the final so I hope when we beat STETHS they won’t say that,” he explained.

May Day, though lacking the prestige of STETHS in cricket and other schoolboy sports, feature Jamaica youth players Reon Edwards and Nashane Meade. Both have created quite a stir this season, in particular, and give Davis plenty of hope.

“I believe we have the best pair of opening pace bowlers in schoolboy cricket in Jamaica,” he said of the two.

Though untested at this stage of the competition, May Day possess immense coaching experience in Simpson who has had urban area Grace Shield success with Eltham High.

On the eve of the encounter, STETHS, the undoubted bigwigs in this battle of David versus Goliath, have expressed they will not take their opponents lightly.

Their Head Coach Clive Ledgister, who remarkably has failed to win only two Headley Cup titles since he took charge of STETHS in 2007, said as much.

“Complacency is one of things in the back of our heads and it’s something I have been stressing to the boys. The May Day team has been together for quite a while … and they’ve entered into a lot of community competitions and all of that, so they have been exposed,” the 12-time Headley Cup coaching winner said.

“I want to keep the guys focused, keep them positive and get this final out of the way. We need bat well, bowl well, and field well, and once we do that we shouldn’t have much to worry about,” Ledgister told the Observer.