Arunava about Football A look at football & the world through my eyes!
Related Articles
Jamshedpur FC Head Coach Scott Cooper spoke to the media after his teams lone goal loss to Odisha FC at the Furnace.
On his analysis of the last few games…
We conceded two goals in the North East game but that was one or two particular players that didn’t do the jobs right and they’ve been told they let the team down that day. They know exactly who they are. You can’t expect your team to always keep clean sheets. We defended well. It was just a little bit of fatigue at the end there that they got in. A little bit lucky. I mean ask yourself what did Goa create other than long balls. That’s all we saw from them. We didn’t see much else in creativity. They got in behind. You know it was a little skirmish and these things can happen at the end of the game. But I think the bigger question is did we respond? and yeah we responded. Did the officials respond? They responded in a way I’ve never seen before.
On how optimistic he is to change the tides…
Well you know me, I’m confident in my players and confident in myself. Everybody has identified that we play a good brand of football. I don’t think there is a team in this league that possesses the ball as well as we do. I’ll be honest. We have faced teams that go into a block, and teams that don’t have the composure that we have. The difference with us is we have the ultimate composure. We have the composure in the defensive and the middle. We need to bring more composure in the final third. It’s a bit of a combination of three things. Number one, we are making bad decisions. Number two, we are rushing at chances, and number three, maybe there is a tweak we can do offensively to give ourselves a little bit more. You can see a lot of our chances come from wide play so maybe some more central attacks will help us. I’ve heard this so many times from the media, fans, and other coaches. They are in the wrong place on the table. It is nice to hear, right? It’s nice to hear and they are probably right but tables are the only truth in football. It’s the truth. It’s the only truth in football if there is truth in how the game is managed. I could point to Punjab FC. Disallowed goals, penalties not given. They could be totally in a different place. Most of the teams like Kerala and Goa win by a single goal. We’ve lost by a single goal. There is a finite difference in what happens and so when you lose 3 or 4, what can you say? When you are losing by one and there are contentious decisions that continue to happen, you have to ask yourself if you look at all the goals we have scored, or against us, or things that have been disallowed or penalties not given, you have to ask yourself if there was VAR, how would the tables look? I can guarantee you, nothing like they do now. So as a coach, I say to myself, what can I do? We have a brand of football that is very good. Everyone can see it. I believe our possession is an example to Indian football. If you want to go play international football, learn how to keep the ball, have a relationship with the ball, don’t just smash it. I think we have a good example of how to keep the ball. We’ve got a bad example of how to snatch at chances and not stay composed in the last third, which we as a team have to rectify. As a coach, I have to give us a little bit more options, but we need to take a look at that. There is a comment about the table, it’s true. We could easily be second or third In the league right now, as much as we are in the league right now. We could easily be in tenth place. It’s not a time to panic either. Tables don’t mean anything until March or April time in any case. If you look at everything that’s transpired, I always say tables are the truth, but in this league, I say they’re probably not.
On keeping the morale high of the players…
It’s just experience as a coach. I won’t let us lose confidence or enthusiasm or bravery or morale, because it’s just how you lead the team yourself. It’s what we do. Our players know exactly what we’re good at. We know exactly what we need to improve on. We know exactly what’s happened to us in games. We speak the truth. We play truthfully. We try to play good football that our fans can enjoy. We know we need to improve in this area. We know how good we’re looking in aspects of the game. And we know what’s happened to us that’s been hard against us as well. And so our players, you might think, oh, they’ve lost three games. We’ve lost by a single goal. Remember what we did with Mohun Bagan SG. In the last 20 minutes, they couldn’t get out of their half. Even when we played with 10 men. La
