Jamaica College and Kingston College will contest the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA)/FLOW Walker Cup knockout final following narrow wins at the Constant Spring playing field yesterday.

Kingston College (KC), who continued from where they left off leading Bridgeport High 1-0 in the rain-interrupted game at half-time at Constant Spring on Tuesday, held on for the remaining 45 minutes yesterday, with the score unchanged, to reach the final, which is slated for Saturday, November 26 if neither of the finalists is in the Manning Cup final.

If either of both teams reach the Manning Cup final, then the Walker Cup final will be played on Wednesday, November 30, 2016.

In the second match, JC dumped a plucky Haile Selassie 2-0 with a double strike from Duhaney Williams in minutes 11 and 61.

Winning coach Miguel Coley was pleased with the team’s progress up to this point of the campaign.

“Well, first of all, we have met the objective in terms of making all the finals. To reach this one, we only played well in patches. The second half I think was an exception as we kind of killed off the game by passing the ball around much better. We did a lot of shifting around which was better for us and we played with greater fluency, but were still trying to find that happy medium to give us more hunger for success. But there are encouraging signs that it will come. We are a champion team and have championship material.”

Ira Hemmings, assistant coach of Haile Selassie, lamented the under-par performance of his team in this particular match since coach Geoffrey Maxwell has taken charge.

“The performance today was very poor; we planned to play JC in a tactical way, unfortunately, things did not work out today (yesterday) for us as everything went wrong and we just have to go back to the drawing board and try to correct it for the next game.”

Meanwhile KC’s coach, Ludlow Bernard, said that “reaching the Walker Cup final should be a morale booster for team spirit for other games coming up. It is true we did not look hot today, but it was not a game to look hot. It was a game with which to defend and to defend properly. We were already in the lead and they would have to come to us, which in fact they did, which means that we had to be strong defensively. It is a type of play I would not have asked of my team all season, but they defended with aplomb by not giving up a chance or opportunity to score and made the game safe for us”.

Coach of Bridgeport Garnet Lawrence said that he “was disappointed not so much by the defeat, but by not being able to motivate his team to play a game that should have been played the previous day. Even though we came out attacking which we had to do because we were a goal down, it would have been a stiff task for the young team to sustain. We did create a few chances, but they were not enough for us to really threaten a KC that were defending well.

“That aside, all is not lost, as we are still in another three trophy events and although it is a young team we can rebound to do much better,” Lawrence added.