“Hard work works”– GDF Head Coach on Elite League win

It was quite an impressive performance from the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Football Club against one of the better teams in the tournament on Saturday last when they defeated the Guyana Police Force (GPF) FC 4-1 to lift the KFC Elite League trophy.
Backed by an animated crowd at the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) National Training Centre (NTC), Providence, the soldiers managed to make the victory look like a walk in the park. However, Head Coach Joseph Wilson credited the team’s hard work and sacrifices in training for the win.
“I’m so happy and delighted for them, because I knew exactly the kind of effort they made to be successful in this tournament,” the Coach shared.

Wilson explained, “I must also say that the work that was put in by all of us, in terms of the morning hours in the National Park, in the rain, in the afternoon in the 2 o’ clock sun at GFC, all came to fore in this tournament. It was hard work, I could assure you [of] that. It was really, really hard work.”
“We believe in the mantra that hard work works and we also believe in ‘train as you play, play as you train’. So, our players are committed to training and that’s why we always execute in terms of game-time situations,” the GDF FC Head Coach affirmed.
In the entertaining final game of the fifth edition of the league, the soldiers had a 2-0 lead by the 11th minute and then led 3-1 by the 29th minute, compliments of goals from Stephen McDonald and Ryan Hackett.
When quizzed about whether or not this was a part of their game plan, Wilson responded in the affirmative, highlighting that it was a tactic they want to continue working on.
The Coach revealed, “The whole league, if you check the whole league, the only team that stopped us from scoring was Western Tigers, because our game plan always is to go hard in the first 15-20 minutes of the football game and to take control of the game after that. And we have done it successfully in almost all of the games, except the Western Tigers game.
“So, it’s something that we’re building on, it’s something that we’re working on and we hope that when we go to the next level, that we’ll be able to transfer the same kind of playing ideology, the same kind of playing style, into the next level,” Wilson went on to share.
This year’s Elite League title is the second that the GDF FC have won in the tournament’s five-year history.