Jersey’s amateurs, fielding a senior team, emulated illustrious names such as Benfica, Barcelona and Boca Juniors in lifting the trophy at Springfield yesterday afternoon.
Dave Matthews’s Island team finished the four-team event level on points and goal-difference with Barcelona’s rising stars, but snatched the trophy with a superior goals-scored total – despite going down 3-1 to an excellent Mar?timo performance in the final game.
Even the defeat was a triumph of spirit as it was Barcelona who were poised to collect the trophy after Mar?timo’s Vitor Junior hit a brilliant, unanswered, hat-trick in the first half.
Jersey, looking tired and mentally drained in their fifth game in ten days, were dead and buried by half time.
Or so thought the vast majority of the sun-drenched 600 crowd.
With their overnight two-goal ‘goal difference’ lead over Barcelona destroyed and no real hope of rescuing the match it quite simply looked like being a game too far for Jersey.
But the Island side responded magnificently to score the only goal of the second half through Chris Carter – enough to match Barcelona’s goal difference and better their goals scored.
Jersey played out the remaining 20 minutes to spark frenzied celebrations after captain Chris Andrews collected the trophy from delighted JFA president Charlie Tostevin.
Jersey, only invited back into the tournament after a four-year absence as it is their centenary year, have taken their opportunity to show the world and its dog just how much they have improved over the past few seasons.
Said manager Matthews: ‘I’m so proud of them.
I simply can’t praise them enough.
‘This vindicates my selections.
I now have a group of players who want to play for Jersey.
We’ve worked hard for this and we’ve shown we can play football.
This team have the confidence to play the ball around against top quality opposition.
‘We were faced with a unique situtation today.
We needed to approach the match as though it was a one-off, but we were tired, physically and mentally – five games in ten days is a tough programme.
‘Mar?timo were excellent and we couldn’t handle them in the first half.
But we got the players back in at half time and rejigged our midfield, tucking in much tighter.
I asked them for 15 minutes of high tempo play and it worked.
‘But we showed how much we have advanced.
We lost out in the Muratti because of naivety, we had that game won but didn’t play it out.
‘Yet today, once we got on back on top of the table with the second-half goal we were able to play the game out.
‘The whole Island should be proud of this team – this tournament is a lot harder to win than the Island Games.
We’ve certainly made backing the Island team an extremely attractive proposition for a sponsor and that is something we’ve needed for a long time now.’ Match report in today’s JEP.
