FC Pune City travel to the home of two-time Hero Indian Super League (Hero ISL) champions ATKwith the hope of bagging a win for the first time this season. Sitting at the bottom of the table and having let in 15 goals in just six matches, Pune’s interim coach, Pradyum Reddy has his work cut out for him if he expects to bag all three points from the match.

Speaking at his pre-match press conference ahead of the fixture, Reddy stated that his team’s poor start to the season is due to the inability to address certain issues which cropped up during the end of last season. “It's been a poor start to the season for us and it’s probably a continuation from last season. If you look at it, the last six games of the season, we were winless. Unfortunately, the issues haven’t been rectified in the pre-season. And they’ve spilt over into the season. Its something that we need to rectify sooner rather than later,” he said.

A leaky defence has been the major issue for the Stallions and the team currently possess the worst defence this season in terms of goals conceded. Reddy, too, agreed to the fact but insisted that the problem needs to be addressed one step at a time and it's an ongoing process. “Definitely, it’s a concern at the moment. I came in after the first three games and we had conceded six goals and had a minus-five goal-difference in the first three games. There were a lot of issues that we needed to rectify. One of the issues was the lack of goals. Three games, one goal. Now we’ve tried to address one of the issues that we had, we’ve scored five in the last three games. But we’ve conceded a lot of goals too."

"If you look at the first three games, it was minus five. If you look at the last three games, it was minus four. But it’s still not where we’ll like to be. And you can see in the last game, in the first half we were defensively very organized. But when you’re in this situation in the league, confidence isn’t at the highest. So, when we concede one goal, you can see the heads drop and then the second goal we concede very quickly. It’s a snowball effect where one problem leads to another and we end up conceding silly goals from individual errors. That’s something we need to rectify,” he added.

With the next international break right around the corner, Reddy said it will be something his team can use to try and address the issues. “I think the break is something I’m looking forward to because this will be our fourth game in fourteen days. We’d like to use the days to change the team, to rectify some of the issues defensively and collectively. I think while defending as a team, we’ve improved in certain aspects in the Kerala game, in the first half against Chennaiyin. But individual errors were there," he said.