ISL | We had planned well for the match and that paid off, reveals Pradyum Reddy

12/08/2018

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FC Pune City interim coach Pradyum Reddy has stated that they had already planned and prepared for their match against the Kerala Blasters and their ploys worked for them. It has not been a good season for the Kerala Blasters this time as they have managed to win only one out of eleven matches.

FC Pune City defeated Kerala Blasters 1-0 at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Kochi, Kerala to pick three crucial points. It was Marcelinho's 20th minute goal which gave Pune the decisive goal and thereafter they did not let that lead slip out of their hands. The interim coach Pradyum Reddy sounded confident about the pre match preparations and revealed that the ploys worked exactly as he wanted it to work, though he expressed that one more goal would have given them that extra cushion.

"We’d done our homework and seen the way Kerala had played in the last couple of games and we were certain Sandesh Jhingan will play out of position. And when he does so, certain gaps appear in the team. The idea was to exploit those gaps. I think we exploited these very well in the first 20 minutes, but we just didn’t take enough of the chances. We scored one goal but should have scored one more before that. It would have been a lot easier to go in with a two-goal lead rather than a one-goal lead."

The Pune side have not had a very good Indian Super League season in which they have managed to win only two matches out of eleven they have played thus languishing at the eighth position with eight points on the points table. But coach Reddy asserted that theoretically, it’s still possible for the FC Pune City to reach the playoffs and he will give it his best shot to take the team to the top four.

"Any team and any coach try to play to win every single match. That’s always the plan. If you win the match, you get three points and if you keep getting three points, you move higher up the table. I cannot control what Mumbai, Jamshedpur, NorthEast and the team above us do. So, we just have to keep winning our games and see where we can go. Mathematically, it is still possible to get into the playoffs. It would require us to win every single match, but we’ll give it a shot," he said.

On the other hand, the story for the Kerala Blasters this season has been no different from the Pune club. The Blasters are placed at the seventh position with one more point than FC Pune CIty. Coach David James was a disappointed man after his team lost 0-1 and extended their losing streak to ten matches.

"Scoring is obviously a problem. In the first-half, I was surprised by how tired we looked. I was surprised as I was expecting the same energy that we had in the Jamshedpur game for 90 minutes. Second-half was much better. A lot more energy. They did very well in slowing the game down from the first minute of the second-half. The first half was way off the mark," he said.

"It has been tough. We tried, we tried. Fans don’t turn up because they’re not happy with the process. There’s been a couple of games that we deserved to lose. Today was one of them," he stated.

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