FC Goa went top of the Hero Indian Super League (ISL) after their 2-1 victory against Kerala Blasters FC at the Jawaharlal Stadium in Fatorda on Thursday. This was Goa’s second comeback victory on the bounce after coming from behind to beat NorthEast United FC 3-1 in their last encounter. The win puts Goa on 10 points after five games and boosts their chances of qualification for the semi-final stage. Head coach Zico spoke to reporters shortly after his team’s 2-1 triumph and was quick to play down any hype surrounding his team being favourites to clinch the Hero ISL title.

“No, we are not favourites, it’s a very tough league and we always have to give our best and try to fight to be amongst the top four. It was a very hard game. The way we came away with a victory, so could they [Kerala Blasters FC]. They have a lot of rehearsed plays, a lot of long balls, and so it was a very difficult game for us. But thank god we had this opportunity. We started the game losing, but we could reverse the situation and we came away with a victory. It is funny because the strong points of them [Kerala] are the long balls and high balls, and we scored against them with two high balls. So it was good for us because we practiced a lot for it too,” Zico said.

Interestingly, Zico fielded more Indian players than foreigners against Kerala. When asked if there was any particular thought behind his decision, the Brazilian great said: “I don’t worry much about that. For me there is no foreigner or Indian player. We have FC goa. The players that we have are ready to play. It’s a very tough league, game after game, and the players have to give everything, so injuries can happen. But we’ll try to recover our players [get our players fit], like we recovered Pranoy [Halder] and Raju [Gaekwad], and I hope for the next game, we don’t have bad news. And it was good to have Raju back, because we don’t have a lot of defenders left. We have just Gregory [Arnolin] and Luciano, and if something happened, it would be very bad.”

Another interesting thing from Thursday’s encounter was Goa’s incessant long ball style of play, normally associated with their counterparts in yellow. When asked what prompted this sudden change in tactics, Zico said: “Every game is a different story. This team [Kerala Blasters FC] have a characteristic of coming forward a lot in attack and so we anticipated many opportunities to give long balls. But they behaved very well today, we didn’t have so many opportunities. But we could make our play and got the victory. We had bad stats in the first half, a lot of wrong passes, so it was easy for them to counter attack. Luckily, we had the strength to score in the first half and get the victory in the second half. In a game like this if you give a lot of passes away, miss some passes, you lose confidence. We had about four players who made a lot of mistakes in the first half, so in the intermission, we had some time with them so that we could give them confidence to them so that they could come back to the second half and do their job.”

On his team’s chances against Mumbai City FC on Sunday, Zico said: “We are going to go for the victory there. But Mumbai is a very different team. They are now more motivated, they beat one of the teams at the top, Delhi. But we’ll do our best to bring victory.”