Nigel Si­mon

Dig­i­cel Pro League cham­pi­on bmo­bile Joe Pub­lic will go in search of its first win in the Con­ca­caf Cham­pi­ons League when it faces Colum­bus Crew tonight. Joe Pub­lic, since its de­but in the com­pe­ti­tion in 2008, has not made it out of the group stages. Lat­er, though, it will look to change that in its Group B match at the Colum­bus Crew Sta­di­um in Colum­bus, Ohio from 8 pm. Cur­rent­ly, Mex­i­co's San­tos tops the group with max­i­mum six points from its two match­es fol­lowed by Crew with three and Guatemala's Mu­nic­i­pal and Joe Pub­lic, with a point each.

The East­ern Li­ons were ham­mered 5-2 at home by San­tos in their first group match be­fore ek­ing out a 1-1 draw away to Mu­nic­i­pal with winger Mic­ah Lewis scor­ing a 90th minute equalis­er. Crew on the oth­er­hand de­feat­ed Mu­nic­i­pal 1-0 at home but then suf­fered a sim­i­lar 1-0 loss away to San­tos. But for to­day's en­counter, Joe Pub­lic coach Derek King will on­ly have 16 play­ers avail­able due to sus­pen­sions and visa prob­lems. The quar­tet of Ka­reem Young, An­dre Tou­s­saint, An­del No­ray and De­von Jamer­son, who is on loan from Ma Pau missed, the trip due to visa prob­lems while de­fend­ers Jevon Mor­ris and Ja­son Springer are both sus­pend­ed.

De­spite the ab­sence of the six play­ers, King said he thinks his team has enough qual­i­ty to come away with a pos­i­tive re­sult against Crew.

"Com­ing off the draw in the pre­vi­ous match with Mu­nic­i­pal in Guatemala the guys gained some con­fi­dence and hope­ful­ly they will build on it when we come up against the Crew. "We will be miss­ing some key play­ers, so this will be a good time for some of the younger guys to step up and grab the op­por­tu­ni­ty. "Based on what we have seen in the group we know that we need to keep bet­ter pos­ses­sion of the ball against Crew, " added King. "Com­ing in­to the com­pe­ti­tion, we knew that if we want­ed to qual­i­fy for the knock­out stage we need­ed to get a win on the road and this is a great chance for us to get a win so we have to go for vic­to­ry."

King will have the avail­abil­i­ty of six mem­bers of the So­ca War­riors, who were in­volved in in­ter­na­tion­al friend­ly match­es against Pana­ma and Be­lize last week. They in­clude Mar­vin Phillip, Makan His­lop, Car­lyle Mitchell, Trent Noel, Ker­ry Bap­tiste and Hay­den Tin­to. The group jour­neyed from Be­lize on Sun­day to join up with the rest of the team in Colum­bus. Mak­ing their sec­ond straight Cham­pi­ons League ap­pear­ance, the Crew was the on­ly team from Ma­jor League Soc­cer (MLS) to ad­vance past the group stage in 2009-2010.

Led by vet­er­ans such as Ar­gen­tine mid­field­er Guiller­mo Bar­ros Sch­e­lot­to and for­mer US na­tion­al de­fend­er Frankie Hej­duk, the squad al­so boasts US in­ter­na­tion­als Chad Mar­shall and Rob­bie Rogers and will no doubt fan­cy its chances of get­ting past Joe Pub­lic. Crew were ham­mered 3-1 by LA Galaxy on Sat­ur­day night in a US MLS match, but still lead the East­ern Con­fer­ence stand­ings with 44 points from 24 match­es, four more than the New York Red Bulls.