WATERFORD High booked their spot in the Urban Area schoolboy Walker Cup Knock-out competition following a 1-0 win over Jamaica College (JC) in their Group A Manning Cup game in Portmore yesterday.

An 18th-minute strike from Theodore Thomas handed the hosts the victory over their perennial rivals. Despite the loss, however, former champions JC still advanced as the best second-placed finishers.

Try as they might, the dark-blue-clad team could not seem to find the right formula to put away their opponents yesterday. Nicholas Scott took them close to levelling the score in the 73rd minute, but his 20-yard dash up the left flank was halted by a substantial Waterford defence and a quick goalkeeper Oshane Jones who dived onto the ball and help his grip.

“We’re glad to be ending the round on a high and we just hope to maintain the form and move onto greater things,” Waterford’s stand-in coach, Ryan Channer, told the Observer afterwards.

Head coach, Floyd Coke, was absent for the victory after coming down with a case of dengue fever.

Channer added that advancing to the Walker Cup is part of the team’s overall plan to take all the schoolboy football titles this year.

“We want to maintain our form and take the Walker Cup and just win everything this year,” he said.

JC’s Delroy Brown said his players were lacking in energy on the day, although he could not account for it.

“This is a Waterford-JC thing,” he added. “Waterford always gives us a hard time in the preliminary rounds and we beat them in the second round.”

“It’s very hard for JC to play on surfaces like this. We tend not to perform very well (but) I’m not too worried about it.”