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It was a thrilling encounter at The Furnace and the Men of Steel almost snatched a draw from the hands of the defending champions despite being down to 10-men. Jamshedpur FC’s Scott Cooper shared his thoughts, frustrations and some pride as well as he spoke to the media after the game.
On the referee’s decisions in today’s game…
The stadium was terrific. It’s terrific. For Indian football, this is what you want to see every week. Full stadiums, two teams, both attacking. We’re playing against the champions. We don’t sit back or try to defend. We go to attack them. It’s a good game of football.
The only thing that spoils this is you don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong anymore. Because everywhere else, even in Thailand, and Vietnam, is VAR. If you have VAR, our penalty at the end is not a penalty. This is outside the box. Steve Ambri is outside the box. This is not a penalty and if it is, it’s a red card. There are two challenges on our players in the first half.
There are so many rules in the league, but the most important thing that’s needed is not there – VAR.
I coach set pieces a lot. I need to stop because you know how many times, when there’s a set piece going into a box, there’s at least five fouls. In the box, people are holding each other. So, you can’t run any set pieces. It’s like a wrestling match, every time there’s a set piece. The referee could probably give five penalties for every one.
On today’s performance…
I think at 1-0, the center-backs are all over the place. We’re pressing them. They’re all over the place and then we have one or two players that decide they don’t want to keep the shape. Look, I promise our fans this. When I look at games back I see players who don’t want to do what they’re supposed to do, they won’t have a future here. Tonight, again, one or two players don’t do the basics. And it’s not because they don’t know. It’s because they chose not to. And so, my view is, we want people that want to do the job, even the hard things that you don’t want to do in a whole 90 minutes. If you don’t want to do that, go somewhere else. I don’t want you around me. You’re not honest. So, the answer to your question is, no. I want to go for a second. I want to go for third. That’s always been in my nature to attack. We played young Sanan tonight. Not because we want to be defensive. He’s not defensively, or tactically aware properly yet. He doesn’t know defensive tactics to the highest level. We’ve got to attack. But, embarrassing for some players when Sanan can do a better job in the tactics than some senior players can. We opened up the door for Mohun Bagan because they made a bad start. We gave them under pressure. Remember, we created more chances than them. We created 13 chances, they created 11. I’m watching. I always tell players, hey, you’re never going to be my friend because when it comes to winning, you either get on board with it or get out of the way.
On the late comeback at the end…
Well, if you look at it, there’s a great save from their goalkeeper. Steve Ambri hit the crossbar post. Steve Ambri looked fantastic, didn’t he? I would like to have played him for the whole game, but he’s still got a little bit of an ankle injury. So we could only use him for 10 minutes. But the 10 minutes he showed was class. Semboi did the same thing. With 10 men, okay, we ran the risk. We had many opportunities with 10 men. It showed the spirit of the team. There’s nothing wrong with the spirit. We just need some players to understand, and do your job right. But the players that came in, Rei, Semboi, and Ambri did really good jobs. When you play like that, you show the coach, hey, I must play because both of them came with serious passion to change the game and do something. We were unlucky not to get it back to 3-3. But you have to give Mohun Bagan the credit. They took the chances. We’re sitting there talking about things that should not have happened. So we’re talking about an inaccurate game because they don’t have the technology to help the officials. I wouldn’t want to be an official in that instance. I promise you I wouldn’t want to be one. It’s madness. The stuff that happens. They have to do so much. And they try really hard. They try to explain themselves. Although I don’t think the fourth official should be laughing about players being hit off the ball. So I think we have to be proud of the players’ performance, most of them. We have to be proud of the fight at the end. But we also have to look at our players and our performance with open eyes and be ruthless about it. I will say this. We created chances still. Mohun Bagan showed some qualities. But there’s a saying, because we’ve got some things to fix but the best music and poetry is written in times where there’s adversity. So sometimes you do your best work in these moments. I would say we’ve got five points from six games, it’s not good enough but we’re playing OK. There are two areas to deal with, some tactical lapses and finishing. And so sometimes you can do your best work in these moments. So we’ve got a couple of weeks to look at it. And then we’ve got November, and December games to analyze and assess and see what we want to do in January.
On fan support till now…
I can understand fans are frustrated. But they can also see that every game we are doing well enough to win the game. We don’t take the chances. Tonight, Mohun Bagan created 11 chances and we created 13. You don’t score goals, you don’t win games. But at least we’re not getting dominated or beaten heavily. Even tonight at 3-1, people might think it’s going to go 4-1 or 5-1 because of the 10 men. We pull it back to 3-2, it could be 3-3. So the fans need to stay with us. Because where I see the problems, I promise you, I’ll fix it. We don’t need to panic. It’s only six games. You know, it’s a long way to go yet. And we’ve played the champions here tonight. And for 20 minutes, I don’t think they showed anything. And then we open the doors for them. So I have to look at that
On Chima…
Chima is a great player. I’m sure he would agree that he wants to score more goals So hopefully that happens. Chima is a hard-working individual. He’s a strong boy. He’s got a good attitude. But we need strikers to score goals, right? That’s the point. We can’t keep creating more chances than other teams and not winning the game.
