SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — Today’s semi-finals of the ISSA/FLOW Ben Francis Knockout will offer two mouth-watering match-ups between the most consistent teams in rural area schoolboy football and will see two games pitting foes familiar with each other.

At the St Elizabeth Sports Complex in Santa Cruz, Rusea’s High and Dinthill Technical will continue their annual match-up after both met in the quarter-finals of the daCosta Cup in the last two years, while at Manchester High, Clarendon College and six-time winners St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) will meet in a repeat of last year’s semi-finals.

The game at Manchester High will start at 2:30 pm, while the other game kicks off an hour later with the winners of the play-to-finish encounters meeting in the final set for next Wednesday, November 8.

The teams got to the last four after wins in Wednesday’s quarter-finals. Rusea’s High beat Holmwood Technical 2-0 at Jarrett Park, Dinthill Technical had a similar win over St James High at Dinthill, Clarendon College, the only team with a 100 per cent record, also won 2-0 at Juici Field, eliminating Manchester High, while STETHS beat Cornwall College 3-1 at STETHS to gain some measure of revenge for their loss in the daCosta Cup final last year.

The same four teams had earlier qualified for the semi-finals of the daCosta Cup where Clarendon College will play Dinthill Technical in one game, while STETHS and Rusea’s High will meet in the other for the right to contest the final set for December 2.

As expected, all four teams were upbeat and confident when they spoke to the Jamaica Observer earlier in the week, though they also paid respect to their oppositions.

Rusea’s High’s coach Vassell Reynolds described Dinthill Technical as “the team of the season so far” based on their impressive results, but said his team was “more all-round as a unit”.

The teams will meet for a third straight year and Rusea’s High are yet to win, but as Reynolds pointed out, the game will be played on “neutral grounds this year, but we are yet to see whether this will have any effect”.

The teams met at Dinthill in the last two years with Dinthill Technical only needing a draw in 2015 to advance to the semi-finals and eventually the final, and won last year on their way to the semi-finals against STETHS.

“From a psychological point of view this game takes on extra importance,” Reynolds admitted. “We had set out to make the semi-finals of all the competitions at the start of the season and now we have to push on.”

Reynolds, who is in his first season at Rusea’s High, said based on performances and statistics both teams had done well to get to this point, but will give his team the edge based on their all-round strength.

Daniel Reid, Leonardo Fogarthy and Nazime Mattalie will carry the weight of expectation to score goals for Rusea’s High, and have been doing well so far but they face a Dinthill Technical team that has not given up a goal in their last four games played.

Everton Burke, manager for the Dinthill Technical team, said, despite being led by the prolific striker Kaheem Parris, who has already earned a call up to the Reggae Boyz senior squad, and has scored 28 goals all year, “we are not a one-man team”.

Burke argued that, unlike previous years when they relied heavily on one or two players, “this year we have scored about 65 goals and Kaheem has scored only 28 goals and did not score in all games”.

In addition to beating Rusea’s twice in the past two years, the Hanover school also camped at Dinthill in the pre-season and that would have given them a first-hand view of today’s opponents.

“We are defensively sound and we score in every game we play, so this team is confident and we will play to the end as the boys have a never- say-die attitude,” Burke told the Observer.

In addition to Parris, who has grabbed all the scoring headlines for himself, Andre Fletcher and Shamari Davis are both capable scorers who have proved themselves throughout the season.

At Manchester High, Clarendon College will take their sparkling, unblemished record into the game against a STETHS team that has qualified for the semi-final stages for the last nine-straight seasons and will not be over-awed by the occasion.

Clarendon College will also be hoping to avoid a recurrence of last year when they lost in all three semi-finals — Ben Francis KO where they lost to STETHS at the same venue last year, daCosta Cup and FLOW Super Cup — and Dyjeon Thomas, who coaches the team along with Technical Director Lenworth Hyde, said this team has more hunger than last year’s.

“We want to put things right this year,” he said. “But it’s one game at a time. I was not here last year, so I can’t speak much about what happened, but this team has shown we want it all,” Thomas admitted.

One big weapon that Thomas will have is Nique Daley, who has scored 11 goals since the end of the first round and together with Lamar Walker and Ricardo McIntosh could make things hard for any defence in the country.

Clarendon College’s 10 goals in the quarter-finals of the daCosta Cup were the most by any team and they will face a STETHS team that has only given up three goals in their last four games.

STETHS’s Omar “Rambo” Wedderburn, who is never at a loss for words, said the biggest positive for them so far was they knew who they were up against.

“We don’t focus too much on what we did right, as the more we do them, the more they become habit; what we focus on are our mistakes as we want to eliminate them as we move on from game to game,” he said.

Wedderburn told the Observer, “We are ready to go and the players understand our concept and we are getting better as the season goes on.”

STETHS have found ways to win even when top scorers Damani Henderson and Shemar Murray fail to get on the scoresheet, as it was central defender Clifton Woodbine, Ronaldo Webster and Alex Thompson who got the goals on Wednesday that propelled them into today’s game.

Today’s schedule

Clarendon College vs STETHS @ Manchester High @ 2:30 pm

Rusea’s High vs Dinthill Technical @ STETHS @ 3:30 pm