‘Nothing to fear!’
Having drawn what is dubbed the “group of death” in the quarter-final round of the ISSA/Digicel Manning Cup competition, Kingston College (KC) Coach Vassell Reynolds says his team has nothing fear from their opponents.
He said his players are confident that once they remain focused and stick to the game plan then they should advance to semi-finals of the competition.
KC, who made it to the semi-finals of last year’s competition, have been drawn in Group 1 alongside the competition’s number one seeded team, St Andrew Technical High School (STATHS), last year’s semi-finalists Mona High, and St Catherine High.
Only the top two teams from the quarter-final group will advance to the semi-finals.
The ‘Purples’, who have been in excellent form this season, advanced into the quarter-finals of the competition after a 7-3 aggregate victory over Campion College in their two-legged contest of the previous round. KC came through a very tough group which included former champions Camperdown, Calabar, Charlie Smith and Hydel.
The vastly experienced Reynolds, who led Rusea’s to the daCosta title in 2017, told the Jamaica Observer that his team has gone about business very quietly in the opening rounds of the competition and are now ready and raring to deliver on the bigger stage of the tournament.
“The aim is to keep competing to the best of our abilities and to keep chipping away at it. We would have gone through a difficult route to have reached this stage because we were in the ‘group of death’ in the preliminary round and so we are accustomed to coming up against good teams like these teams that we are going to meet,” said Reynolds.
“This is a group that includes STATHS and Mona who are the pre-season favourites and so the plan is to continue to improve and keep on doing well this season.
“However, we have nothing to fear because we continue to exhibit the Kingston College spirit, which is the ‘Brave may fall but never yield’, so we have been fighting and we have been working hard and so we have nothing to fear from any of these teams,” Reynolds said.
KC, who last won the Manning Cup title in 2021, will be depending heavily on the likes of leading scorers Demario Daley (13 goals) and Alex Heslop (eight goals) to lead the charge. They are expected to get solid support from Captain Robert Seow and Oniel Graham.
