De­fence Force cam­paign in the 2023 CON­CA­CAF Club Caribbean Cup has end­ed af­ter go­ing down 2-0 against Mo­ca FC of the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic at the Hasley Craw­ford Sta­di­um, Mu­cu­rapo on Wednes­day night.

The mis­sion was sim­ple for the De­fence Force, to win and se­cure a spot in the semi­fi­nals of the tour­na­ment but the team stum­bled at the crit­i­cal stage need­ing all three points to ad­vance, while the vis­i­tors need­ed on­ly a draw to stay alive and se­cure the sec­ond spot in the group.

The 2023 T&T Pre­mier Foot­ball League (TTPFL) cham­pi­ons saw their sup­port­ers come out in their num­bers in what they hoped would be a reg­i­ment per­for­mance iden­ti­cal to teams of the past, the 1978 and 1987 who were crowned cham­pi­ons.

From the start, head coach Lloyd An­drews’ game plan was clear to take the game to the op­po­nents.

In do­ing so, the vis­i­tors soaked up all the pres­sure in the ear­ly ex­changes as they too had a plan and the host’s poor fin­ish­ing was play­ing right in­to their hands.

Af­ter 45 min­utes of steady pres­sure Mo­ca’s de­fence didn’t budge, and the teams went in­to the dress­ing room even­ly match at 0-0.

In the sec­ond pe­ri­od, the vis­i­tors no­ticed they could make it more dif­fi­cult for the sol­diers if they scored a goal and they amend­ed their game plan to seek the de­sired re­sult.

They found suc­cess in the 64th minute and what a cru­cial open­ing goal it was, a deep cross from Juan An­ge­les was ini­tial­ly de­flect­ed out by the host team’s de­fence and Mo­ca’s Gus­ta­vo As­cona was first to re­act to the loose ball, pok­ing home the fin­ish for an in­valu­able 1-0 lead while si­lenced the thou­sand-plus fans cheer­ing the Army/Coast guard com­bi­na­tion team.

The goals al­so ig­nit­ed the ur­gency lev­el of the Teteron unit which was not in the hunt for two goals.

Coach An­drews made five sub­sti­tu­tions try­ing to in­ject some form of life and fin­ish­ing with re­sults in the fi­nal third in­to his squad but all he got was half chances and wast­ed op­por­tu­ni­ties as the Mo­ca de­fence stood resoloute de­spite the con­stant at­tack on their goal.

As the time ticked away and re­al­i­ty be­gan to set it was Mo­ca, who ex­tend­ed its lead in­jury added on time when Ronal­do de Pe­na fin­ished off a coun­ter­at­tack af­ter a de­fen­sive slip-up to com­plete the 2-0 score­line ce­ment­ing their sec­ond-place fin­ish in the group on 9 points.

In re­sponse to his team’s per­for­mance coach An­drews said that he was dis­ap­point­ed that his guys didn’t get the vic­to­ry and that scor­ing nu­mer­ous goals in a sin­gle match has been plagu­ing them for the en­tire tour­na­ment. He con­tin­ued, that the one-all draw against Cav­a­liers FC of Ja­maica in their open­ing en­counter came back to haunt them for not tak­ing full points in that fix­ture.

He al­so dis­pelled claims that the sim­i­lar re­sult to lo­cal ri­vals AC Port-of-Spain was the rea­son they are now out of the com­pe­ti­tion.

De­fence Force fin­ished third in group A with five points while Gold­en Li­ons lies fourth with three, and AC Port-of-Spain fin­ished fifth with just one point. Mo­ca FC pro­gressed in sec­ond spot with nine points and Ja­maica’s Cav­a­liers FC topped the group with 10 points af­ter ham­mer­ing Li­ons 5-2 in their fi­nal group game.