For a sec­ond time this sea­son, de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons De­fence Force moved to the top of the T&T Pre­mier Foot­ball League (TTPFL) stand­ings in Tier 1.

Goals from Ri­val­do Cory­at in the 13th and Kai­him Thomas in the 90+1 were suf­fi­cient to hold off Cale­do­nia AIA 2-1 in a resched­uled round six en­counter at the Ken Cooke Ground at the Po­lice Bar­racks, Long Cir­cu­lar Road, St James on Wednes­day night. How­ev­er, it could be just a short stay at the top for them, with third-place Club San­do FC, on 24 points, set to take on To­ba­go’s 1976 FC Phoenix from 6 pm in a reg­u­lar sched­ule match-up at the Phase Two Recre­ation Ground, La Hor­quet­ta, Ari­ma to­day.

Cale­do­nia en­tered Wednes­day’s clash with a strug­gling record of three wins from nine match­es in this sea­son’s com­pe­ti­tion. They had al­so tast­ed five de­feats and one draw pre­vi­ous­ly.

Look­ing to im­prove that record, the ‘Stal­lions’ took the ear­ly ad­van­tage through Jadiel Joseph in the 5th minute.

How­ev­er, Cory­at equalised for the Army be­fore Thomas, who re­cent­ly re­turned to ac­tion from in­jury, sealed the win at the death.

The win pushed the De­fence Force to the top of the 12-team stand­ings with 26 points. They are now nar­row­ly ahead of Mis­cel­la­neous Po­lice FC, who have 25 points from 11 match­es. Prison Ser­vice FC, who led the chart for the first five rounds, are now in fourth po­si­tion, with MIC Cen­tral FC Re­boot, last sea­son’s run­ners-up, now in fifth, en­ter­ing the sec­ond round of the com­pe­ti­tion.

Mean­while, in Wednes­day’s oth­er game at the Po­lice Bar­racks, Ter­minex La Hor­quet­ta Rangers won in iden­ti­cal fash­ion over FC Ea­gles. Ea­gles had tak­en an 11th-minute lead via Do­minic Dou­glas, but sec­ond-half goals from Moses Jaikaran (64th) and Kevon ‘Show­time’ Wood­ley (85th) lift­ed Rangers to a come-from-be­hind 2-1 win.

That re­sult el­e­vates Rangers to tenth in the stand­ings with eight points.

The TTPFL Tier 1 en­ters the sec­ond half of the sea­son as ac­tion con­tin­ues this evening with the Club San­do and Phoenix en­counter. The 8 pm kick­off sees Cale­do­nia and FC Ea­gles squar­ing off, as both teams play their sec­ond match in three days.