The Boss Spoke To The Club Website After The Blues Suffered Their First Defeat Of The Season In Mumbai…

His thoughts on what went wrong…

I think both teams had a very clear plan. All teams come into the game with a plan and tonight, Mumbai won the three points because it was their gameplan that worked. Their idea was to go for the counter attacks and they scored a goal through one of them. We had two options – one was to defend and avoid the counter attacks while the other was to go for the game. We took the risks tonight and went for the game.

We started with our wingers trying to get the ball into the box and we had some great chances to score that we didn’t take. Mumbai is a team that if they score the first goal, then they know very well how to defend and go for the counter attack and get the job done. It is very difficult to avoid their counter attacks during 90 minutes because we know the power that they have in those counter attacks. They are really good with that. We were working to try and avoid that, but the one time they managed to beat our defence, they scored.

On Mumbai’s physicality…

It is clear that Mumbai is a more physical team than us, and you can see that in one on one situations. That’s one reason why we put more men in the midfield and we played with Xisco as a false number 9 trying to get the ball in the middle of the pitch and trying to take advantage of that.

Our players might not be that powerful physically, but they give everything and I am very happy with their performance. They have been working so hard. You can see that Kean is not the strongest player on the pitch, but he is giving 100% of his heart. We had some moments in the game that we could’ve taken and the result would have been different.

On Sunil and Udanta’s form…

I think it wasn’t one of the best games for Sunil or Udanta. They have been training a lot, and they have been competing in the Asian Cup, so you can see that they were not fresh. But it is part of the calendar and we cannot do anything about that. They are important players for the national team and all of us genuinely wish that they were still playing in that competition because we want the very best for India.

On missing firepower up front…

We know that Mumbai is a team that defends very well, and that’s the reason they have a lot of clean sheets. We are playing without Miku, so we are just trying to put some players in that position but it is not their natural position. Tonight, we even asked Edmund (Lalrindika) from the B team to help us in the final minutes of the game and to try to create something in that number 9 position. I am happy with the way we were playing because we were not going crazy. We always try to get crosses in from the wings. In some games it works while in some it doesn’t. I can definitely say that our team has always been competitive and today we were without Nishu, without Miku, without Rino, and we have still been very competitive.