The Nigerian striker scored a brilliant goal that could have been the match winner
Robbie Fowler’s squad selection ahead of the FC Goa game raised a few eyebrows as he dropped five players from the East Bengal roster who recorded the club’s first-ever Indian Super League (ISL) victory three years ago. barely days.
Among the excluded players, there were big names like Anthony Pilkington and Jacques Maghoma. In the absence of the two talismans, the blame fell on new recruit Bright Enobakhare who only played 20 minutes in the last game but managed to score a goal. The Nigerian striker honored his manager’s confidence by scoring a sensational goal.
East Bengal started the match in a 5-2-3 formation but they often changed shape during the match. Enobakhare has been given a free role as he has at times been seen joining forwards Harmanpreet Singh and Aaron Amadi-Holloway in advance and occasionally returning to support midfielders.
The five-a-side defense worked well for Fowler as for the first time this season the back line didn’t look shaky and instead handled FC Goa’s deadly attack with confidence. In fact, Gaurs’ most dangerous player Igor Angulo, who is currently the league’s top scorer, remained silent for the majority of the game. Credit must be given to Fowler whose zonal tagging cover plan for the Spaniard has worked well.
In addition, it was the first time that the defending players were all “natural” defenders. Prior to this match, Fowler had used Surchandra Singh, Sehnaj Singh, Mohammed Irshad and Bikash Jairu in the background in different matches, but all of the aforementioned players were makeshift defenders and this was reflected in their performance.
The Rouge et Or would consider them unlucky not to come away with three points as they clearly had better scoring opportunities than the Gaurs. Robbie Fowler also mentioned after the game that his team deserved to get all three points. “We probably had the best chance. They obviously had chances themselves, but ours were sharper, and theirs were more set pieces. ”
The Gaurs dominated the game in terms of possession as expected. Debjit Majumder had to make three real saves, but two of them came from free kick situations. They clearly had more quality up front than East Bengal, but were unable to break Kolkata’s side defensively as expected except for once when Devendra Murgaonkar scored the equalizer. They failed to capitalize on the man advantage they had for more than 30 minutes.
Ferrando’s team have got into the habit of keeping the fate of matches in suspense until the last moments. It worked in their last two games and a bit in this game as they scored a late equalizer but that shouldn’t continue. They have to start grabbing their opponent by the neck of the neck from the start and try to finish matches early, otherwise they risk losing more points in the future.
They can’t let Igor Angulo save them every game.
