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After 27 games in 11 days, the 35th edition of the Federation Cup concluded on Saturday. Here are some key numbers from the tournament.
0 –Churchill Brothers failed to keep a clean sheet in the tournament but crucially they went all the way despite not having a foreign defender in the squad.
1- Of the four semi-finalists, only one club had an Indian coach – Mariano Dias (Churchill Brothers). Dias eventually became the first Indian coach to win the competition since Subroto Bhattacharya (East Bengal) in 2007.
2 – A couple of former World Cuppers featured in this edition. Both Cornell Glen (Shillong Lajong) and Anthony Wolfe (Churchill Brothers) were part of Trinidad & Tobago’s 2006 FIFA World Cup squad in Germany.
2.93 – The goals per average in the Federation Cup is higher than that in the I-League (2.42) with just one goalless draw in 27 matches.
3 – There were only three sending offs and all of them came in the group stage – Charles Dzisah (Eagles FC), Rohit Mirza (Mumbai FC) and Clifton Dias (Salgaocar)
4 – Five players finished joint top scorer with four goals each including Indians Balwant Singh (Churchill Brothers) and Victorino Fernandes (Sporting Clube)
5 – Churchill Brothers won each of their five matches in regulation time. East Bengal were the last winners to do so in 2010.
6 – 13 penalties were awarded in the tournament and six of them were not successfully converted. Yusif Yakubu (Mumbai FC), Sunil Chhetri, Sean Rooney (both Bengaluru FC), Edeh Chidi (East Bengal), Penn Orji (Mohammedan Sporting) and Boima Karpeh (Sporting Clube) were the culprits and all those failures came during the group stage.
7 – Churchill Brothers scored 12 goals in five matches and seven of them came in the first half. They were never behind at any stage of any game in the tournament.
8 – Shillong Lajong were the joint-top scorers during the group stage with eight but still couldn’t make it to the semis as they finished second behind Mohun Bagan in Group C with the Mariners also scoring eight but they had one more point.
9 – For the first time in nine years there was no Kolkata club in the final as Mohun Bagan were beaten in the semis. It was only the sixth final without a Kolkata team in the history of the tournament and the first-ever all-Goan affair.
16 – East Bengal were aiming to reach the final for the fifth straight edition but instead got eliminated from the quarter-final group stage for the very first time. The 2-1 defeat to Sporting Clube was their first-ever loss in the quarter-final group stage and it ended a 16-match unbeaten run with 12 of them being victories.
19 – Only seven clubs used their full quota of four foreigners but overall 19 different foreign countries were represented over the course of the tournament.
30 – When the Indian Super League got postponed to September 2014 there were fears regarding the future of the IMG-Reliance contracted players with many of them losing their place in the Indian national team. But IMG-R have loaned several of those players to I-League and second division clubs with as many as 30 featuring in the Federation Cup.
31 – Overall Indians performed quite well in the 35th edition but predictably the percentage of goals for foreigners was more. 31 of the 79 goals (39.2%) were scored by Indians.
