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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Joe Public entertains Columbus Crew tonight

by

20101020

Dig­i­cel Pro League cham­pi­on,bmo­bile Joe Pub­lic will seek to end its dis­ap­point­ing cam­paign in Group B of the Con­ca­caf Cham­pi­ons League on a high when it hosts Colum­bus Crew at the Mar­vin Lee Sta­di­um, Ma­coya from 8pm. The match at Ma­coya will be of aca­d­e­m­ic in­ter­est to both teams as Crew (nine points) has al­ready earned a spot in the quar­ter­fi­nal round af­ter San­tos (13 points) whipped quar­ter­fi­nal hope­fuls, Mu­nic­i­pal (eight points) of Guatemala 6-1 on Tues­day night in their fi­nal match to top the group. Mu­nic­i­pal en­tered the game with eight points, two be­hind San­tos, one be­hind Colum­bus and need­ing a vic­to­ry to ad­vance while Joe Pub­lic has one point. With Tues­day's re­sult San­tos and Crew ad­vanced to the quar­ter­fi­nals to join Mon­ter­rey (Mex­i­co), Cruz Azul (Mex­i­co) and Re­al Salt Lake (MLS).

Joe Pub­lic coach Derek King is ea­ger to get a first group stage win, but he is al­so mind­ful of his team's First Cit­i­zens Cup fi­nal against ti­tle-hold­er, De­fence Force at the same venue on Sat­ur­day and will be tempt­ed to rest a few key play­ers. Speak­ing ahead of his team's match with Crew, King said, "We are con­sid­er­ing ro­tat­ing the team for the match against Crew but at the same time we al­so don't want to ham­per the team chem­istry ahead of Sat­ur­day's fi­nal. "The guys know we did not achieve what we set out to do in the Cham­pi­ons League and are hop­ing to fin­ish on a win­ning note by aveng­ing the 3-0 away loss to Crew," added King. While King may not make too many changes to his squad he will have to cope with­out the sus­pend­ed duo of de­fend­ers, Car­lyle Mitchell and Nigel Daniel along with na­tion­al Un­der-20 duo, Ke­neaz Williams and Mar­cus Joseph. Williams and Joseph are cur­rent­ly in Ven­zuela with the na­tion­al youth team for a six-team in­vi­ta­tion­al tour­na­ment.

Joe Pub­lic goes in­to the match buoyed by a 3-1 semi­fi­nal win over W Con­nec­tion in the First Cit­i­zens Cup semi­fi­nal while the strug­gling Crew earned a dra­mat­ic point away from home on the week­end, ral­ly­ing to tie Toron­to FC 2-2 at BMO Field thanks to goal­keep­er Will Hes­mer who knocked in a sec­ond-half stop­page time equal­iz­er off a cor­ner kick on Sat­ur­day to be­come on­ly the sec­ond goal­keep­er to score in open field play in MLS his­to­ry. Hav­ing al­ready se­cured its knock­out stage spot, the Crew, win­less in its last six MLS match­es and trail­ing trhe New York Red Bulls by one point in the race for the East­ern Con­fer­ence reg­u­lar-sea­son ti­tle are al­so ex­pect­ed to rest most of its reg­u­lar starters' pre­sent­ing Joe Pub­lic with its best chance at vic­to­ry. When both teams met at Crew Sta­di­um on Sep­tem­ber 14, the hosts got goals from Le­an­dre Grif­fit, Ja­son Garey and Steven Lenhart in a 3-0 vic­to­ry.


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