Shawn Coop­er, the Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do coach does not want to put any more pres­sure on his young bunch of play­ers head­ing in­to the Co­ca Co­la Na­tion­al In­ter­Col Fi­nal against San Juan North Sec­ondary at the Ato Boldon Sta­di­um in Bal­main Cou­va on Wednes­day.

How­ev­er, he wants to avoid a sit­u­a­tion of 'de­ja vu' when the teams meet from 4:30 pm this af­ter­noon.

The game will fol­low an ear­li­er Girls In­ter­Col fi­nal en­counter be­tween Pleas­antville and Sig­nal Hills Sec­ondary from 2:30 pm at the same venue.

On Tues­day, Coop­er said it could be a case of de­ja vu if his play­ers do not win on Wednes­day.

In his school's last In­ter­Col fi­nal match in 2016, they de­feat­ed San Juan North 2-1 in the League but lost 1-0 to them in the In­ter­Col fi­nal. This year, the south­ern­ers were again 2-1 win­ners over the San Juan boys, but this time they will be hop­ing to pre­vent the jinx of an­oth­er loss to the same team.

Be­sides that, coach Coop­er hasn't been too hard on his play­ers, re­duc­ing his train­ing ses­sions to just a cou­ple times a week to al­low the play­ers the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­cu­per­ate.

"Af­ter los­ing some nine play­ers from last year, we have made it very clear this year that it would have been a re­build­ing year for the team, and to be fair to them, they have ex­ceed­ed our ex­pec­ta­tions so far, be­cause we were not ex­pect­ing them to achieve as much as we have," Coop­er ex­plained.

He added, "We are al­ready very proud of them so what I want is for the young play­ers, is for them to go out there and have fun, do their best, and try to win the match." The irony, how­ev­er, is that Coop­er's 'young' bunch of play­ers will have the task of earn­ing the school their sec­ond In­ter­Col ti­tle in more than 44 years.

Pre­sen­ta­tion's last In­ter­Col win came back in 1975 and de­spite the in­ex­pe­ri­ence of the team this year, they have racked up a few im­pres­sive achieve­ments, such as con­ced­ing the least amount of goals for the Pre­mier Di­vi­sion held ear­li­er (7 goals) and just two in the In­ter­Col play-offs. The south­ern­ers al­so fin­ished the League in the sec­ond po­si­tion and will be in a sim­i­lar po­si­tion should for­tune not favour them this af­ter­noon.

Mean­while, San Juan man­ag­er Stephen Clarke said his team wants to fin­ish the sea­son with a bang, by win­ning it for a large num­ber of play­ers who will be leav­ing the school af­ter this sea­son. They in­clude in­stru­men­tal strik­er Re­nal­do Boyce, Isa­iah Chase, Ma­lik Far­ri­er, Eli­jah Gar­cia and Kendo Math­ias, among oth­ers.

"We are liv­ing our dream of play­ing on the first and last day of the SS­FL, so why wouldn't we want to win? At this time we feel very con­fi­dent that we are go­ing to win the ti­tle, once we dig deep and play the type of foot­ball we know we can play. Too be­sides, we will have sev­er­al play­ers play­ing their last game, so we want to win that for them," Clarke said.

He dis­missed con­cerns his team was beat­en by their coun­ter­parts in the League, say­ing, "They played us when we were go­ing through a dif­fi­cult patch, but now it's the fi­nal and the play­ers are aware of how im­por­tant it is for them," Clarke said.