Mumbai City FC coach Alexandre Guimaraes insists on calling every game a battle and was happy that his team was the one which came out victorious against Chennaiyin FC on the home turf on Sunday.
His team also tends to approach matches in the same way with the defence and midfield throwing in hard tackles from the very first minute with the team clearly happy to sit back and soak in the pressure before trying to hit on the counter.
This also means that the opponent feels like being in the game for long and Chennaiyin FC coach John Gregory even went to the extent of calling it a “one sided game” that they should have won by a huge margin if they had taken their chances.
It’s true that Chennaiyin had more ball possession (52% to Mumbai’s 47%), made more interceptions and had two shots more on target that their hosts but to call it a one-sided affair would be an anomaly.
Mumbai City FC showed glimpses of what they are capable of when going forward with their Cameroonian midfielder Achille Emana Edzimbi calling the shots with his incisive play and Balwant Singh manning the left flank. It was this very combination that got the hosts the penalty through which Emana scored to help the team move up to fifth spot in the standings, just two points behind the lead pack.
While that statistics make for good reading at the end of the day, it is pretty clear that Guimaraes’ side would have to be far more clinical in the way their maintain their formation and in their ability to convert chances to stay in the hunt till the business end of the league.
Guimaraes insists that he isn’t worried about the issue by giving an example of how his team won many matches with a similar score-line in the last edition as well. Last season, when the team reached its maiden semi-final in the competition, Mumbai City FC managed to register four 1-0 wins but lost a similar number of games by identical margin despite the likes of former Uruguay and Manchester United striker Diego Forlan and Haiti’s Sony Norde in their line up.
“In our case, the idea is the same from last season. We have to be solid defensively because we know we also have players that can make a difference, and I think that in the second half they had more chances to make a difference. Sometimes, we lacked precision.”
“Last season too, we won many games 1-0. So, the thing is that we won. Of course, we had some chances after 1-0 to score more goals, but today 1-0 was enough,” he added.
On Sunday, the hosts were probably lucky that Mohammed Rafi, who started in place of Jeje Lalpekhlua, could not find his finishing touch despite being in position to kill the game at least half a dozen times. Thoi Singh and Jude Nworuh also could not exploit the gaps left by Davinder Singh and Abinash Ruidas on both the flanks.
Ruidas and Davinder were guilty of losing the ball rather easily while making a forward run and on any other day would have been punished for the errors. The defensive errors have already cost the team in their opener against Bengaluru FC and then in the Maharashtra Derby where they sat back after scoring the first goal and ended up conceding two.
Need for a striker
But the bigger area of concern for Guimaraes is to find a striker who could convert the chances Emana can produce despite being the most heavily marked player on the pitch.
Mumbai City FC has managed just five goals in five outings so far and on Sunday, their Spaniard recruit Rafael Jorda looked ill at ease as the lone man upfront. The 33-year-old centre forward was found wanting for pace on the counter and clearly lacked the finishing touch when, on two occasions, he only had the goalkeeper to beat.
There were many occasions where the forward line wasn’t really reading Emana’s passes which meant that many chances just went abegging.
Guimaraes admitted that the players tried too many things in the final third but insisted that they have the firepower required to find the winners when required. “We had the numbers in the final third in the second half. We are also waiting for Leo (Costa). But our priority is to stay in the lead pack.”
His team would have to be far more clinical to achieve that goal.
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