Top five attacking duos in I-League history

4. Yusif Yakubu & Ryuji Sueoka (Salgaocar: 2010-11)

Yusif Yakubu (in pic) shared a great partnership with Ryuji Sueoka

They only played one season together at Salgaocar but what a campaign it turned out to be. In the 2009-10 season, the two faced off in the Big Kolkata Derby as Ghanaian Yusif Yakubu was at East Bengal and Japanese Ryuji Sueoka joined Mohun Bagan in the second half of the season. Both the Kolkata giants struggled in the I-League but Yakubu and Sueoka didn’t do much wrong. Yet, they were not offered new deals by the two arch-rivals and instead were signed by Salgaocar coach Karim Bencherifa in 2010-11.

The Moroccan had taken over Salgaocar in March 2010 when they were fighting for survival but by the second half of the next campaign, they were challenging for the title. And the two standout performers were Yakubu and Sueoka. The Japanese would operate in the hole just behind lone striker Yakubu in a 4-4-1-1 system and that brought the best out of the two as they had a combined goals tally of 35, with Salgaocar scoring 58 in total. Yakubu, who by then was already a legend in Indian club football, once again showed his class despite being at the age of 34, while Sueoka proved that Mohun Bagan made a huge mistake by not giving him a new deal as he won the I-League in his first full season in India.