After losing in last season’s final, Cavalier FC will be looking to exact revenge when they take on defending champions Mount Pleasant Academy in the Wray & Nephew Jamaica Premier League final at the Nation Stadium, at 6:30 pm on Sunday.

It’s arguably been one of Cavalier’s most challenging seasons as they were inactive during the opening weeks due to their participation in the Concacaf Caribbean Cup which saw them travelling to Trinidad, Antigua, and Dominican Republic in the space of five months.

However, after registering just three wins from their first eight games and sitting in the bottom half of the table, Cavalier surged into second place with 54 points, which included a 14-match unbeaten run.

Technical Director Rudolph Speid says to return to the final after the season’s challenges is nothing short of amazing.

“The start of the season, we lost Collin Anderson, Ronaldo Webster, Christopher Pearson all to overseas clubs and last season we lost [Richard] King and [Dwayne] Atkinson before the final so what we did [this season] is tremendous,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

“In our own evolution of both myself and the team, this is a moment you must cherish and embrace because this final will never come back again. We’re embracing the moment and one of the best ways to enjoy it is to win, which we’re planning to do. It’s not an usual place but what is unusual, we haven’t won any in recent times so we trying to change that.”

Defender Kyle Ming also had high praise for his coach, whom he believes is the best around.

“He’s a genius because he knows how to monitor our bodies — when we train, how often, the break, and stuff like that,” Ming told the Observer. “He manages the players very well, how much minutes they should play and certain things we don’t see, he’ll sit us down and say, ‘Look, ‘hey you’re going to play this way, so we need to do this.’ Sometimes we don’t see those stuff but he does and we just follow his instructions and it always works.”

Ming and his defensive partners have produced great performances which saw them concede just 19 goals from their 28 matches this season, which is the third best record of the campaign, along with 12 clean sheets.

“Anyone plays,” Ming said. “The heart that we have, once we go out there, the main aim and objective for us is to not to concede. It doesn’t matter who goes out there, me, [Jeovanni] Laing, King or whoever, the desire is to not let anyone score, so that’s always the aim for us.”

Their attacking threat has been equally important and 20-year-old Jalmaro Calvin has led the charge with 20 goal contributions.

Calvin missed out on last year’s final but is now leaving his dream after guiding his team this season.

“It’s a very special feeling, this is what we’ve been working for, especially for me,” he told the Observer. “I’m very proud because growing up as a kid, I always dreamt about playing in the Premier League and I actually have a chance of winning it. I’m very confident in my team. Obviously when we played the final, we didn’t have players like Atkinson and King, and I wasn’t there. This time we have our full team and we’re very confident, very driven. Our aim is to win the league and we’ll go out there and try to win it by playing our best.”

Mount Pleasant have been deemed as the favourites due to their defending champions tag along with finishing top of the league standings but Speid isn’t worried about public opinion.

“Nobody doesn’t want to say I’m a good coach but that’s fine,” he said. “What it does is motivate us to be better which is really good so the naysayers are our best motivators. We love them because they help us to be better every single day. We’re the underdogs, Mount Pleasant have the odds to beat us but we feel good about it, we’ve always defied the critics.”

Though acknowledging Mount Pleasant’s quality, Speid believes his ‘more mature’ team can create what some would call an upset.

“They have a good team, there’s no weakness,” he said. “I don’t even worry about [Shaquille Dyer] who won’t play, because they have about two or three replacements for him. But with everybody’s strengths, there are weakness. That’s why the person who invented football is a genius. You can’t cover everywhere on the pitch, you can only use 11 players, the goal doesn’t move, the size of the field doesn’t change, so we have some constants that we can work. One of the things we have is speed and lots of it.

“[For us], everyone has improved. Ming, [Shaniel] Thomas, Calvin is a revelation, probably the MVP of the season, people just don’t talk about him, we have Atkinson, who is exciting. That’s why we’re feeling confident that it won’t go like last year, it was competitive last year even with what we had. They would have bought a lot of players but we we’re quietly confident that we can pull it of.”