Tivoli end season on high against rivals
GOALS from Jamie Robinson and Keithy Simpson carried outgoing champions Tivoli Gardens to 2-1 win over Harbour View in the battle for fifth place in a season-ending premiership game at Edward Seaga Complex on Sunday.
Robinson opened the scoring for the hosts after six minutes, but Damion Harwood equalised for Harbour View on 44 minutes.
But former National Under-20 midfielder Simpson curled home a splendid free-kick five minutes before the end for the West Kingston side to finish the season in fifth place on 56 points — three more than Harbour View.
Tivoli’s assistant coach Alvin Shaw said it was a disappointing defence of their title, but they had already identified their problems and will be sorting those out before the start of the next campaign.
“We’ve identified a few areas where we went wrong and our objective now is to see how best we can get ready for next season,” he said.
“Even some of the players have identified where they went wrong, so we’ll be going forward next season as a unit, because both coaches and players acknowledge what we did wrong and I think we’re going to be much stronger next year,” he said.
He said although they will be looking at some of the Under-21 players to make the transition to the senior team next season, they will also be looking outside to strengthen their squad.
“Our objective towards the latter part of the season was to finish on a high, which we did, and I must give the players credit for putting on a good performance… I think we’ll finish much better than we did this year,” he added.
Harbour View’s coach Donovan Hayles was also disappointed with this season’s exploits, especially that they never challenged for the title all season.
“Finishing in the top six was not bad, but we were not able to contest the competition because most of the time we were out of it,” he said.
“So we have already started to analyse what we need to do coming into the next season… we played some good football, but have just not been scoring goals, and this is one of the areas we want to correct for next season,” Hayles added.
