Kerala Blasters FC head coach Steve Coppell has insisted that his team’s last-place finish last season won’t affect their Hero ISL 2016 campaign in any way as the Kochi-based side takes the field against NorthEast United FC at the Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium in Guwahati in the league curtain-raiser on Saturday.
When reminded of their performance in Hero ISL 2015, the Englishman said: “Well, in a way it’s a good thing because we can’t get any worse. I look at it and say it happened last year and will have no effect on what happens this year because it’s a totally different squad, we’ve re-signed some players but the squad is more or less different,” Coppell said.
He continued: “We certainly have ambitions to finish a lot higher than last season and it just shows you the contrast because the year before the team made the final and last year we finished bottom, I hope we can reverse the trend and be in the final this year.”
Coppell, who makes his Hero ISL debut tomorrow having coached English clubs Manchester City, Crystal Palace and Reading in the past, spoke favourably of the atmosphere in the lead-up to the game.
“It’s been good, we’ve had an interesting journey starting off at Trivandrum five weeks ago and then we spent some time in Thailand and then we were in Kolkata for a week and now we’ve been here in Guwahati for almost a week now.
“I’d like to say thank you to NorthEast who made their facilities available to us. So a big thank you to them and we’ve been made welcome, it’s been a warm welcome from everyone here and I hope we can put on a good game to say thank you to everyone here,” he said.
Coppell, however, refused to measure his team against other teams in the league just on the basis of their pre-season. “I have said several times it’s very difficult to judge because so far we’ve played a couple of games in Thailand, we’ve played a couple of games otherwise. We look at the other teams on paper and the players they have, international players and Indian players and because we haven’t played anyone in India yet, it’s very hard to judge the level where you are against them. It’s only after two-three games that you can judge that whether the work you’ve done is correct work,” the 61-year-old, who played as a winger for Manchester United from 1975-83, said.
Coppell also played down the notion that the format of the league that often requires teams to feature thrice in a week is way too demanding. “I think you’ll find most international players come from leagues where they play Saturday-Wednesday so they are very much used to playing three games in seven days. If you average this out [Hero ISL’s format] it probably comes to a game every 4 or 5 days.
“The thing that makes it more difficult is the travelling and it’s demanding but that’s why you have a big squad and you have to have a big squad you have confidence in, this is one league where it isn’t about your best 11, it’s about your 25 performing on a weekly basis and that is the challenge.
“Recruitment is the most important process in any football club, you know it’s very important you get the best players and it sounds stupid but the best players don’t always make the best teams, you know it’s that chemistry of how they gel together, and again it’s more demanding here because if you look at our team we have Indians, South Africans, we have French, Haitians, Spaniards, English.
“There is such a cultural mix and to try to get them thinking the same way, playing within the framework of a team is the most important thing. And the team that is most successful at end of December is the team that has accomplished that feat,” he said
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