Week II. Musings II. Here's our take on everything that has happened in the latest round of Indian Super League fixtures:
East Bengal are a Constantine team alright
39% possession. 213 passes at 72% accuracy vs. 354 at 80%. 12 shots vs. 25 (seven of them blocked). 0.65 xG vs. 0.83. Three goals vs. one. Three points vs. zero.
Stephen Constantine will value the result and his team's performance, where they never really looked like doing anything but winning. They were clinical and defended in numbers, and Cleiton Silva is what they officially call a 'baller'. There's a lot of hope their massive fanbase can take from their first win of the season.
But there's a small line of caution they would be advised to heed -- this performance came against a rather hapless NorthEast United, who gifted them the opener and then missed an absolute open goal early on. Three games in, they are the only side yet to register a point. They are creating chances but in key moments at either end they go missing, big time. This will be a major concern for Marco Balbul, especially given the trigger-happy nature of the club's management.
Goa are Goa, and that's a good thing
Carlos Pena has Goa playing the Goa way: you're never really that far from seeing a chance on goal. Just don't try and predict which end. Life is to be lived, football is to played: Whether it's Sergio Lobera's organised chaos, Juan Ferrando's unintentional chaos or Zico's pure chaos, this has been the FC Goa way (in as short a history as they have had).
In two matches they've taken 45 shots (including nine blocked) and scored off four of them. And yet, they conceded 23 shots in Chennai (four blocked) with the home side arguably creating the better chances. It won't faze them, though. Dheeraj Singh remains a spectacular keeper (that really was some double save off Ali and Sliskovic) and they are creating bucket-loads of chances, what's to be fazed about?
������ ��������, ������ ���������� ��#ForcaGoa #UzzoOnceAgain #CFCFCG @dhee_singh01 pic.twitter.com/9uSps9XCi4
- FC Goa (@FCGoaOfficial) October 23, 2022
Chennaiyin, meanwhile, need to make sure the bogey of big-chance-missing doesn't rise again. The danger is real.
Risk-free Bengaluru can afford zero errors
This isn't the first error Gurpreet Singh Sandhu has made, and it probably won't be the last. That's okay: Sandhu knows how to push mistakes aside and move on. After all, players make mistakes, that's just part of the game. The issue here for Simon Grayson and his Bengaluru FC is that the way they play right now, his players can afford to make none.
If you discount the NorthEast game (because, well, NorthEast), they have been outshot, outpassed and for most phases, outplayed in two of their three games. Against Chennaiyin they took 10 shots (three blocked, one on target) while their opponents had 16 (one blocked, six on target). On Saturday, they barely attempted to play -- Hyderabad had 25 shots (six blocked, four on target) to their four (none blocked, two on target) and an xG of 1.03 to 0.20. Even if you consider the fact that Hyderabad are the best team in the league and the fact that xG as a stat is far more useful when taken over the course of a season than an isolated match, '0.20' smacks of negativity.
There is, of course, no one way of playing football; but if you travel down the 'no-risk, safety-first, 1-0 is enough' road the only acceptable destination is trophy-land. They appear quite far away from there... for now.
P.S. Hyderabad really are the best team in the league right now. Bart Ogbeche is properly up and running too -- he's got two in three matches.
What's Greg Stewart doing up top?
Mumbai City are a fine footballing side. There are few, if any, sides in the league stacked with their level of individual talent and they seem to be playing well enough together. What's the problem then, you ask?
Well, for one, they only have five points in three games: two draws and a tight win. For another, and this is far more important, they are still stuck in second gear. A large part of that, in this column's eyes, stems from playing their best player -- the league's best player -- in a position where he cannot maximise his strengths. It's understandable that with Jorge Diaz slowly coming back from injury, Des Buckingham would look for an alternate solution at striker, but Greg Stewart is the squarest peg he could have found. When you have Stewart on your team, you want him to run with the ball as much as possible, and that's hard to do when he's playing target-man. Diaz's return should soon resolve this issue, but even if he has to continue to be eased in, it should be non-negotiable that Stewart be brought back (left wing, 10, right wing: anywhere along that line).
Oh, and retrospectively, they could have used the height of Mourtada Fall against the only team in the league that plays the rare footballing phenomena: the big man-bigger man combo up front. Which makes Jamshedpur an interesting prospect going forward: no defence is really equipped to handle aerial bombardment led by Harry Sawyer and Daniel Chukwu.
Kerala Blasters need to arrest the slide
It's a mini-slide, but a slide nonetheless. If you take the last hour against ATK Mohun Bagan last Sunday and most of the ninety against Odisha this Sunday, there were shades of the soulless football that has been the club's cross to bear for most of its short history.
It's early, though, and Ivan Vukomanovic won't be flustered, but he needs to see his team convert moments into more sustained spells of pressure. High-pressing for fifteen minutes looks sensational, but if you can't maintain it, it eventually becomes pointless. For a man who's always taken great pride in not having a fixed way of playing football, this will jar. Changes, whether they be in personnel or in playing style or in just plain intensity (they looked troublingly flat against Odisha), should be incoming. They'll need it too against their next opponents, Mumbai.
Odisha, meanwhile, seem to have picked up where they left it with Josep Gombau. They look a fun, free-spirited side whose quality will trouble any opposition in this division.
A late winner from @pedro9martin helped @OdishaFC snatch all 3 points over Kerala Blasters FC in their first home game of the campaign! ��
ICYMI, watch the #ISLRecap! ��#OFCKBFC #HeroISL #LetsFootball #OdishaFC #KeralaBlastersFC pic.twitter.com/6ceKpBegjV
- Indian Super League (@IndSuperLeague) October 24, 2022
Weekends are the best
May the powers that be bless whoever came up with the ground-breaking idea of playing football only on weekends. Already the calendar looks less stifled and the coaches look happier. More football by playing less football, that's the way.
Most importantly, this column has become a lot more tension-free when taking in a round of matches.
The Refe...
No. We promised, and we are nothing if not a column of its word.
In other (non-ISL) news
Oh, I-League fixtures... where art thou?