Dempo SC from Goa will take on the local outfit Mumbai FC in round I of the third edition of the ONGC I-league at the Cooperage Football grounds on Saturday.
Even before the start of the match Goan outfit coach has lot of players who are injured. Mahesh Gawli, Sunil Chhetri, Dominic Noronha, Clifford Miranda but that doesn’t bother the coach. As he thinks that the others will surely fill in and put their best foot forward when they take on the local team.
What worries the visiting team coach Armando Colaco is that he is never seen the Mumbai FC new team play so he wont be able to analyse them or work on it.
“It is an away match for us we do have a lot of our players injured but then I am sure that the others will do their job well. I have not seen the Mumbai FC team play for a long time now,” said Colaco.
Colaco feels that despite the fact that he has the best players in his team he is not too happy with the combinations in them. A win in an away match will surely boost the confidence of the former champions.
“My main worry for my team is the combination factor they hardly have got time to play together. And the type of game that Dempo is used to keeping the ball short is not what player like Chetri and Anwar are used to. But then I hope that they gel well,” added Colaco.
But for the Mumbai FC coach Khalid Jamil he needs to work on all areas of the game before they take on Dempo in home conditions. They have completed their last minutes signings and have re-signed their striker Abhishek Yadav and also have Japanese-New Zealander Kayne Vincent with them.
But they will surely be relying on the striker duo of Abhishek and Kayne to make a fist of their initial matches in the league before they get their three foreigners.
Courtesy: The-AIFF.com
From the archive. First published on footballkerala.com on Saturday 3 October 2009, restored from the site's 2012 database. Text as originally published.