AFTER SUFFERING a first-ever opening-day defeat in the Concacaf Caribbean Cup away to Cibao of the Dominican Republic last week, defending champions Cavalier will try to rebound when they tackle Haitian outfit Juventus De Cayes in their Group B match at Sabina Park, starting at 7 p.m.
Coach Rudolph Speid admits that his team, which has lost many key players from last season, is in unfamiliar territory with the defeat and knows how important it is to get three points from today’s match.
“We always try to win,” Spied told the pre-match press conference.
“This is the first Caribbean Cup we would have lost our first game, so we are in unfamiliar territory. But they say you learn more when you lose, and I hope we would have learnt a lot from that loss.”
In two competitive matches so far this season, the back-and-white-clad team are yet to find the net. But Speid insists it was always going to be hard to replace the goals of Dwayne Atkinson, Jalmaro Calvin, and Richard King.
Nevertheless, he said they have identified how they can score goals, and believe they will soon get it right
“It (goalscoring) will be a problem until it is not a problem. We hope tomorrow (today) it will not be a problem. We have worked on it. We have put more people in attacking positions.
“It’s just a matter of mindset. The people we have, have scored goals before and they are still capable of scoring goals.
“In the preseason we were scoring goals. So I am not worried. What we have done, though, is diversify where we get goals from because it is hard to replace an Atkinson, a Jalmaro Calvin and a King with one go. So we are looking for diversity, and I am sure it will click at some point.”
Despite the slow start and the team in transition, Speid said they have enough to get the better of the Haitians, who also lost their opening game.
“Just do not panic. We looked at where we went wrong (first game). We have seen some stuff we could have done better.
“We looked at the (Juventus) team and we saw some things we can exploit. The problem is, they only had 13 players the last match, so I expect them to get about 10 new players for this encounter, so it’s kind of difficult to gauge where they are. But we are hopeful.”
“We always defend any title that we have, and we will be defending it again this year.
“We are not really worried. It (loss) does make life a little bit harder for us now. So we need to get points in this game and that is all we are focused on right now.”
Cibao lead the group with six points from two matches, followed by Defence Force of Trinidad with three points from one match.
Weymouth Wales of Barbados, Juventus, and Cavalier are still without a point after one game each.
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