Just as the fight for the T&T Pre­mier Foot­ball League Tier I ti­tle be­tween ti­tle-hold­ers T&T De­fence Force Elite and ri­vals Club San­do FC will go down to the fi­nal match day next week, the bat­tle for the all-im­por­tant third spot be­tween Prison Ser­vice FC and Mis­cel­la­neous Po­lice Ser­vice will al­so be de­cid­ed on the fi­nal match day.

This was af­ter both Prison Ser­vice FC and Po­lice FC reg­is­tered com­fort­able wins over 1976 To­ba­go Phoenix and MIC Cen­tral Re­boot in their re­spec­tive Round 21 match­es at the Ken Cooke Ground, St James Po­lice Bar­racks, Long Cir­cu­lar Road, St James, on Sun­day night.

In the night’s open­er, Prison Ser­vice got a goal from five dif­fer­ent play­ers in their 5-2 drub­bing of 1976 To­ba­go Phoenix to climb to 44 points ahead of their fi­nal round meet­ing with Cale­do­nia AIA, while Po­lice blanked MIC Cen­tral FC Re­boot 4-0 to move to 39 points ahead of match­es against Phoenix, a resched­uled en­counter in To­ba­go on Wednes­day at the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um, in Ba­co­let, and then their fi­nal day du­el with San Juan Jabloteh.

For the Prison Ser­vice, Ky­ron Williams opened the scor­ing in the ninth minute, and in the 25th, Kevon Williams made it 2-0, which they took in­to the break be­fore na­tion­al de­fend­ers Dar­nell Hospedales (57th), An­ton Joseph (88th), and Ri­car­do John (90th) added one each.

De­spite the loss, 1976 To­ba­go Phoenix man­aged to get two con­so­la­tion items through Richard Car­de­nas in the 90+1 and Ke­iron Matthews in the 90+3.

Need­ing a win to keep up their push for the third spot, Po­lice FC al­so start­ed bright­ly, with Mick­aeel Jem Gor­don fir­ing in the go-ahead item in the eighth minute and Eli­jah Bel­grave ex­tend­ing the mar­gin to 2-0 in the 29th.

Four min­utes in­to the sec­ond-half, Jem-Gorn got his sec­ond of the con­test while Jabari Mitchell added the fourth item in the 62nd.

At the end of the sea­son, the top two clubs on the ta­ble will qual­i­fy for the Con­ca­caf Caribbean Cup, while the third-place team will qual­i­fy for the Caribbean Foot­ball Union Club Shield, which al­so serves as a qual­i­fi­er for the Con­ca­caf Caribbean Cup.

Go­ing in­to the fi­nal round of match­es, De­fence Force leads the stand­ings with 49 points from 21 match­es, a mere point ahead of Club San­do.

In the fi­nal round, the De­fence Force faces a tricky clash against for­mer cham­pi­ons Ath­let­ic Club Port-of-Spain (AC PoS) while Club San­do en­ter­tains FC Ea­gles.