Chennaiyin FC were crowned Hero Indian Super League (ISL) champions just six months back, thus winning their second title in four years. Going into the current season as one of the favourites, the defending champions’ start has been anything but perfect with the club losing all three of their opening fixtures and leaking goals at will. The John Gregory-led unit will now be tasked with facing a Delhi Dynamos FC unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi, who themselves will have a point to prove after a winless start to the season.

A day prior to the clash, Gregory was present at the pre-match press conference, where he was invariably asked about the morale of his team given their plight so far this season. “The boys are feeling good. Very good and all are very fit. All 25 players are in contention. And, of course, we know that playing against Delhi, we have a couple of our old boys there from last season who both have got gold medals. So, we’re expecting a tough game.”

Carrying the ‘defending champions’ tag has been far from ideal for the Chennai outfit given the burden that it bears. However, the Englishmen dismissed it, instead stating that his side haven’t been as bad as the results showcase. “You can always look at reasons why we haven’t started well. And you can always make your own judgements and your own assessments. But the effort has certainly been first class. The effort that all the boys have put in the first three games has been incredible. And, certainly, I’ve got no problem with how they’ve approached every game.”

Continuing on what has been their drawback this season, he said, “It’s just that we’ve made a couple of defensive mistakes. Big mistakes which we rarely made last season in the 18 regular season matches. I think we’ve had just one game against NorthEast United FC where we didn’t play well at all. And that was the only time that defensively we were not as good as we had been. But our team last year was always built on a really solid defence. And we were always very strong and it was difficult scoring against us. But in the last two matches, we haven’t defended as well as we should do. So that’s really been the thing that has let us down. Other than that, our confidence is very high.”

When further prodded about whether he was aware of what had gone wrong defensively in the last three matches, Gregory responded by singling out costly individual mistakes as the root cause of all their problems. “Well, I do know what’s wrong. Obviously, when you see the video evidence you see where we made genuine errors. It’s just making people aware of it. Making the players aware of it, letting them see on video exactly some of the positions that we got ourselves in, which allowed opportunity for the opposition. We did so well to get ourselves 3-1 up against NorthEast and then it was just people not marking when they should have been marking. People not concentrating when they should have been concentrating and that gave opportunities to the opposition. It’s just little points we’ve highlighted to our boys and once we make sure that that side of their game is good, I’ve got no fears for the rest of the season.”

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