With only a victory standing in their way of reacquiring Elite League status, Slingerz FC head-coach Charles ‘Lily’ Pollard stated that while his charges are prepared for the League Playoff final against Monedderlust, he is not approaching the encounter in an overconfident manner.
This was disclosed during an exclusive interview with Stabroek News yesterday. According to the former Golden Jaguar international defender, “We are confident, but we are not disrespecting the opponent. We need to cross our ‘T’s and dot our ‘I’s, and the team that makes the fewest mistakes will probably win the game. We are not overconfident, but we are confident. We also need some luck on our side during the final.”
The Vergenoegen-based outfit will face off against Monedderlust of Berbice in the final of the Elite League playoff on Saturday, with the winner earning a berth in the 2024 edition of the competition.
Slingerz FC sealed their place in the final following a comfortable 3-0 win over Winners Connection of Linden in the semi-final segment. The West Demerara unit also defeated Dominators [6-0] and Winners Connection [1-0] in the group stage to maintain their perfect record.
On the other side, Monedderlust overcame the Beacons 3-2 in the other semi-final fixture to seal their place in the championship match. The Berbicians, who also sport a perfect record, topped Group A with victories over the Beacons of Bartica [4-1] and the Buxton Stars [3-0]. Quizzed about the status of the team’s preparation heading into the important fixture, Pollard disclosed, “We are not taking the team lightly; we think they are a physical team, and they have a lot of speed.
We are doing our homework and will be putting our best foot forward for the final.
We are training every day, but we normally train four days a week, and after the festive season, we need to do physical sessions to get the guys back to the required fitness. We are up for the game; this has been our objective from the beginning. We want to get into the Elite League, where we rightfully belong.”
Probed on the quality of the tournament, Pollard conceded, “From the beginning, we knew that we had the better team on paper. We have a few national players, but football is not played on paper but on the field, and football is on the field. We can only play whoever is in front of us, so we can’t really assess many of the other teams. What I did recognise is that after 40 minutes, the fitness levels of the other teams dropped because they probably don’t train as much as we do.”
