Chennaiyin management confirms Materazzi won't play this season

The Italian excelled as both player and coach at Chennaiyin last year

Chennaiyin FC seem a determined lot. Much like last season, they have retained marquee player and the Golden Boot winner from season 1, Elano and have stacked up their defence to ensure they don’t concede too many and make opponents work extremely hard to earn. While the likes of Potenza and Mendy don’t quite match the stature of Alessandro Nesta and Marco Materazzi, they surely are pillars any ISL franchisee would treasure having.

What adds to the Tamil Nadu based team’s aura is their never-say-die attitude; much like 2014, when they recovered from a 0-3 deficit in the semi final vs Kerala Blasters, Chennaiyin put up a stellar show against defending champions Atletico de Kolkata in the season opener on October 3.

While they lost the game, they must have taken a lot of positives from the fixture; and thus today as they prepared to face Delhi Dynamos, assistant coach Vivek Nagul sounded extremely assured and confident of his team’s abilities. In a chat with the media, he talked about the mistakes the team committed vs Atletico and how they are approaching this fixture.

Nagul confirmed Materazzi will limit himself to coaching this season

Excerpts:

Chennaiyin were not good very defensively last year. There were a lot of defensive errors in the previous game as well. Where do you think the team went awry again?

We know our weaknesses and while I have to admit we committed quite a few mistakes, there is quite some time for the season to culminate. I am sure over the next few games, we will gel better and improve as a unit.

Marco Materazzi is not registered a player as yet for this year’s campaign. Considering how instrumental he was last year, is it possible we will see him again?

He was really good last season on and off the bench. But this season, he is likely to stay in the technical area.

Star of the first game-Jeje is out currently on international duty. Do you think that will hamper the team’s preparations?

Playing for the country is obviously a priority and I wouldn’t want Jeje to miss it for anything. Having said that, we have other equally talented players like Balwant and I think they will do the job.

Are there any fitness concerns ahead of the Delhi game?

We have a couple of concerns, Fikru being one of them. We don’t want to rush him or anyone else though and will only play them as much as they are comfortable.