There will be no favours for T&T Pre­mier Foot­ball League’s (TTPFL) cham­pi­on, club De­fence Force when they square off against arch-ri­val AC Port of Spain in a Group A clash of the Con­ca­caf Caribbean Cup from 6 pm on Thurs­day evening at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo.

The Army/Coast-Guard Com­bi­na­tion squad are cur­rent­ly third in the five-team stand­ing with four points and will be des­per­ate­ly seek­ing to win to­day to se­cure their sta­tus as a top two fin­ish­er in the group and thus avoid the pres­sure of a must-win sit­u­a­tion in their fi­nal en­counter against Mo­ca FC on Oc­to­ber 4 here in T&T.

The group is present­ly led by Cav­a­liers FC of Ja­maica on sev­en points, with Mo­ca FC of the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic sit­ting in sec­ond place on six points

De­spite dom­i­nant per­for­mances in their three match­es they’ve played to date, AC Port of Spain still find them­selves root­ed at the bot­tom of the ta­ble with ze­ro points as poor fin­ish­ing has seen them yet to find the nets in the cam­paign which re­sult­ed in loss­es against Cav­a­liers, Mo­ca FC and the Gold­en Li­on of Mar­tinique.

At the pre-game press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, cap­tain, Du­ane Muck­ette and tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor Gilbert Bateau, said that de­spite be­ing elim­i­nat­ed, they still have their pride to play for and said that al­though the De­fence Force is the on­ly oth­er lo­cal team in the tour­na­ment and they wished them the best, AC Port of Spain will still be go­ing af­ter a win as they were de­ter­mined not to come out of the tour­na­ment with­out a sin­gle point.

Coach Walt Nor­eiga echoed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments to his tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor and cap­tain, not­ing that while a win would be great for his team as it would give them some­thing to build on, it would not be dev­as­tat­ing for the De­fence Force, who would still have their own fate in their hands to ad­vance, as they still have Mo­ca FC to con­tend with in their fi­nal match.

“AC Port of Spain has not played to their full po­ten­tial in the three games so far. I feel we still have a point to prove, and whilst we may not ad­vance in the tour­na­ment, we still have to go out there and show that we can com­pete with whichev­er op­po­nent they put in front of us,” Bateau ex­plained.

Muck­ette, on the oth­er hand, told the me­dia: “We have played some good foot­ball, we just didn’t score our chances. Had we scored our chances, we would have been in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent po­si­tion now.”

With the top two teams ad­vanc­ing out of the group, De­fence Force coach Lloyd An­drews, who was ac­com­pa­nied by his skip­per, Justin Gar­cia, at the press con­fer­ence, spoke about mak­ing his­to­ry in the tour­na­ment.

“I am quite hap­py with the way the team has per­formed thus far, but this is crunch time where the per­for­mances have to be lift­ed, and we in­tend to do that and ex­e­cute ef­fec­tive­ly to­mor­row (Thurs­day).

“To go for­ward in this tour­na­ment will mean the world to us, be­cause that’s what we have been play­ing for, to go to the Caribbean Cham­pi­onship fi­nal, then to the Con­ca­caf Club Cham­pi­onship and pos­si­bly to the World Club Cham­pi­onships. So they are all in front of us, it’s just for us to get on our high hors­es and do the job.”

Gar­cia told the me­dia that while to­day’s game is two lo­cal teams com­pet­ing, it is not the same feel as when play­ing in the TTPFL as it is a to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent tour­na­ment. His con­cern is to fol­low in the foot­steps of pre­vi­ous De­fence Force teams that have made his­to­ry by go­ing deep in­to the tour­na­ment.

“This tour­na­ment means a lot to us. This is some­thing we’ve been look­ing to for the longest while, and now be­ing here, we want to make his­to­ry for our­selves. We’ve al­ways heard about the past teams that played in the tour­na­ment and made his­to­ry, and we want to go down in his­to­ry for our­selves,” Gar­cia said.