Chirag United Kerala (Formerly known as Viva Kerala FC) will begin their training at the Jawahar Municipal Stadium, Kannur, from August 12, 2011, prior to the 2011-12 season. After finishing the last season in the tenth position, Chirag Kerala are hoping for a better performance after the merger of the club with the Kolkata based Chirag United Sports Pvt Ltd.
KP Kunhikrishnan will continue as the head coach of the club and there are no changes to the rest of the team officials. The new owners have appointed Subrata Bhattacharya, who was the head coach of United Sports Club, as the Technical Director of Chirag United Kerala.
The squad will continue their training at Kannur for the next three weeks and then, will fly to Kolkata to prepare for the Federation Cup 2011 tournament.
Home Ground:
After a lot of speculations regarding the shifting of the team's base to Kolkata and the unavailability of stadiums in Kerala, it is now confirmed that the South Indian club will play their home matches of I-League at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Kochi. Due to the unavailability of the Kochi stadium at the start of the season due to cricket matches, the club will play their first five home matches at the Kerala Universtiy Stadium, Thiruvananthapuram.
The club are to begin their new I-League campaign against HAL SC at Bengaluru on October 22, 2011. They will play in front of the home support for the first time when they play Air India on November 6. The other matches that takes place at Thiruvananthapuram will be against Dempo SC (November 17), defending champions Salgaocar SC (December 3) and Churchill Brothers (December 10). A team from the All India Football Federation (AIFF) is expected to visit the University Stadium to check on the standards of the ground in the coming week.
**The Squad: Ajayan and Saleel joins
**
The club experienced a fall out of players during the off season with several key players leaving Viva Kerala for bigger clubs. NP Pradeep (Mohun Bagan), Anil Kumar PK (Dempo SC), Bello Razaq (Prayag United SC) and Karma Tsewang (Pune FC) have all left the Kerala cub. But the team made good business in the transfer market to acquire the signatures of Ajayan K, Gunasekhar Vignesh (both from Pune FC), Shahaba Saleel (ONGC FC) and Jagdeep Singh (Salgaocar SC). Earlier, it was reported, including by us, that Ajayan and Saleel had struck a deal with Josco FC, but this seems to have had collapsed.
The team also confirmed the signing of two foreigners - striker Alex Carioke from Moto Club de Sao Luis in Brazil and defender Isaac Boakye from Ghana, brought in from Young Africans SC in Tanzania. The search is ongoing for the two foreigners' spots that is left unfilled.
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From the archive. First published on footballkerala.com on Friday 12 August 2011, restored from the site's 2012 database. Text as originally published.