After starting on a high, the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Football Club suffered a narrow, crushing loss as the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) Club Shield resumed on Monday afternoon.
Under the tournament’s Swiss Format group system, the local Elite League champions were tasked with taking on the Dominican Republic’s Moca FC after both teams pulled off respective victories on Saturday last.
At the Larry Gomes Stadium, Trinidad and Tobago on Monday afternoon, the GDF’s passing became their biggest problem as the reigning Elite League champions struggled to find the back of the net.
GDF’s starting XI before Monday’s clash with Moca FC
Moca, however, did not waste time to go one-up in the contest, doing so in the 14th minute.
Capitalising on a set piece coming in from the corner, Moca’s Yohan Parra stood waiting at the ‘first post’ where he lost his footing in redirecting the ball into the net, way out of reach of GDF’s keeper.
The strike went on to become the game winner when neither side came close to piercing the goals again. As such, Moca FC will move on to the competition’s semifinals, alongside the winners of Groups A, C, and D.
Following the narrow loss, GDF Head Coach Joseph “Bill” Wilson summed up his team’s performance in what was a must-win game for them.
“It’s just another day and I would kind of dispute that, because I thought that the players gave their best. They gave their all, sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t and, unfortunately, this evening it didn’t work for us. I thought the commitment was there and in the last 20 minutes of the game, I thought we had them on the back foot, but it’s just a little bit more patience in terms of getting the ball into the box and finishing, I think that was the main cause,” Wilson explained.
“Like you might rightly have said, it’s the anxiety to score and anxiety to win the game [that cost the game].”
The experienced Guyanese gaffer went on to discuss the team’s preparation in the tournament’s lead-up, noting that his squad was quite confident.
“We did a lot of work, yeah. We played a lot of practice games back home against the top local clubs and we were satisfied in terms of the progression being made and the ideas that we tried to implement in the game coming into this tournament and we were fairly confident of getting past, at least this stage in the tournament,” he shared.
However, Wilson also took the time to highlight the high points of his team’s performance across their two-game outing.
He expressed, “We enjoyed attacking runs, we enjoyed possession in the middle third, I think our defending has been fairly solid in the last two games; our goalkeeper did a good job, our second goalkeeper is a national Under-20 goalkeeper and I must congratulate them. I should not, and I cannot, fault my boys for this afternoon. I thought that they represented themselves…, on another day, the results may have been different.”
The GDF FC will now shift their focus back to their title defence in the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) Elite League which just resumed for the second part of season seven.
