Low budget NorthEast give high voltage show
NEW DELHI: In four seasons of the Indian Super League (ISL), NorthEast United had been the only side among the eight original teams in the competition to never make the play-offs.
The Guwahati-based team finished bottom of the table twice in last four seasons, never being a serious contender for the title.
With the club operating with the lowest budget among the ten teams in the fifth season of the tournament and with transfer signings that didn’t particularly make many take notice, prospects didn’t seem bright at the beginning of the 2018-19 campaign either.
To complicate matters, the appointment of Dutchman Eelco Schattorie as head coach also faced a hurdle, and went through only after ISL’s rules on eligibility for head coach were relaxed last year. However, since his arrival, the former Prayag United and East Bengal coach has managed to turn the club’s fortunes around, taking them to the play-offs for the first time in their brief history. In the lastfour stage, Schattorie’s side will face two-time national champions Bengaluru FC.
With seven wins, eight draws and three defeats, NorthEast haven’t had an easy ride and have shown a few chinks in their armour over the course of the season but according to Schattorie, the club has managed to get the most out of the players.
“We didn’t go on a training camp in pre-season. There were also other problems like the foreign players came late. The most important thing is that I only focused on the team. That means I didn’t look much on the organisation around the team but the team itself,” he explained.
The club took to the 2018-19 season with one of the smallest squads in the tournament. The lack of squad depth can be comprehended from the fact that only four players have scored for the club this season. Twelve of the 22 goals have come from just one player – Nigerian forward Bartholomew Ogbeche.
“If you have a high dependence on four players, of course that is a problem. For us, we have lost less games than (the top two) Bengaluru and Goa but we also have a lot of draws. That has to do with the depth of the squad and mainly the Indian players because only one Indian player has scored goals,” Schattorie said. “Then you cannot say that the coach hasn’t got the maximum out of the players; that has to do with quality. We probably have the most players who have not played in the ISL before.”
With the play-offs approaching, Schattorie will hope to make the most of his thin squad and will have to do without injured centre back Mislav Komorski, a player he says is ‘not easy to replace’.
Once the season ends, the Dutch tactician’s attentions could turn to the vacant India coach’s role, a position he had applied for in 2014 before the appointment of Stephen Constantine, who resigned after the national team’s Asian Cup campaign in January. “I will be very honoured to be asked for that position. Right now I would like to focus on the play-offs but as I said, any coach would be interested in the national team job.”
› We didn’t go on a training camp in the pre-season. There were also other problems like the foreign players came late for the ISL. EELCO SCHATTORIE, NE Utd coach