ISL 2019 | What Clicked and What Didn’t - Jamshedpur FC

If going by sheer points then the Steelers have hardly made any progress in ISL this season as compared to their debut campaign. They could manage to garner just one more point from then while finishing in the same fifth position, which further points to the fact that the other teams have progressed more as Jamshedpur remain stagnant.

First and foremost, the biggest success for the side was new manager Cesar Ferrando, who shared the same vision as the club owners and more importantly, he almost executed it to perfection. The former Atletico Madrid and Valencia manager was appointed to instill the Spanish elements in the side, which was otherwise entrenched in Steve Coppell’s rigid philosophy, and the Spaniard pulled it immaculately. Though it meant that the club had to concede more goals than last season, three more to be précise, it also meant more goals scored and above all fluid passing football that kept the audience at the edge of their seats. Consequently, the 60, 000-seater JRD Tata Complex saw the highest average of 20, 016 attendance per game amongst all the ten teams. Making their debut last season, JFC had the second highest average attending of 21, 374 then after Kochi, and retaining most of the fans wouldn’t be considered a failure in the eyes of the management.

The six-month-long league hardly encourages the competing clubs to offer two-year contracts to its players, breeding a culture of huge revamps every season. While it is difficult to determine if that would harm the league in the long run, it surely has made the job of the managers and their scout teams incredibly difficult. And it was one of the things that JFC got bang on. A huge advantage of getting a manager from a fourth-tier Spanish club was his in-depth knowledge about the local talents. JFC could tap into some of the mesmerizing Spanish players at a cheaper rate like Mario Arques from third-tier CD Alcoyano and Sergio Cidoncha from SD Ponferradina. They got their star of the season, Carlos Calvo, for free. The Spanish trio was directly involved in nine goals and 10 assists throughout the season and Ferrando would now have a clear core of players to build around a squad for next season. The imports worked decently in cases of Indian players as well with the defensive likes of Pratik Chowdhary, Dhanachandra Singh, Augustin Fernandes making a mark.

What Didn’t 

Another position that hardly worked for the Steelers was the strikers'. Now, one of the very few decisions that Ferrando had gotten wrong was undermining the role of a centre forward in ISL. He had kept inexperienced Sumeet Passi and Gourav Mukhi as his centre-forward backups for fan favourite Tim Cahill. Consequently, Jamshedpur often had to dig deep to get goals with Cahill hardly hitting his form throughout the season managing just two goals and an assist in 11 games. While the idea of playing a primarily attacking midfielder up front looked strange to many, the false no. 9 has been a thing in Spain for long now. 

However, Ferrando’s final piece of the puzzle failed to fit and in more ways than one. While Cahill had arrived at the league injured and after few games in between, left the league injured, his backup Mukhi couldn’t survive for long either. The Indian striker had started as quite an enigma scoring once and assisting another in three matches, before getting banned for age fudging. Ferrando’s misfortunes didn’t end there though, as his best player on the pitch, Calvo, was also out for three matches for his racial slur and to further compound that he didn’t have enough funds to replace them in the mid-season transfer window.