AFC Cup: I was disappointed with the turnout – East Bengal Coach Trevor Morgan

Wednesday’s AFC Cup round of 16 clash against Myanmar’s Yangon United was East Bengal’s biggest game in nine years and they won it in style, a 5-1 thumping win inspired by Edeh Chidi, to reach the quarter-finals for the first time since 2004.

Considering East Bengal’s huge fanbase, there should have been a good turnout at Kolkata’s Salt Lake Stadium, especially because the match kicked off at 6pm in the evening but that didn’t happen as the official attendance didn’t even reach 10,000. According to AFC it was 8000 but anybody who was at the stadium would tell you that the turnout was much lower.

So the 12th man that the East Bengal squad was hoping to have wasn’t there as the atmosphere was mostly flat, which didn’t do justice to the exceptional performance of Trevor Morgan’s side and thus the coach was understandably upset.

“I was disappointed with the turnout because yesterday when their coach asked how many people one could expect, I said it could be between 20 to 60 thousand. Considering the importance of the game it’s disappointing because for an East Bengal – Mohun Bagan derby there would be around 60,000 cheering for us passionately and we needed that today,” Morgan stated.

The win saw Morgan’s squad match the class of 2004 and become the first Indian club since Dempo to win a knockout match in the AFC Cup, but most questions at the post-match press conference was about the Englishman’s future and whether the progression in the Asian tournament compensated for their failure to win the I-League.

Morgan refused to talk about this future and when asked to compare the performances in the I-League and AFC Cup, he said, “People keep talking about the I-League and it’s true that we haven’t won it but for me as a team we have been progressing. Because the real test for a team is to respond from a disappointment and we bounced back from the defeat on Saturday in style.

“Today was a great performance and result for East Bengal and depending on the draw, who knows, we could go as far as possible in the tournament.”

Although the whole team deserves credit for reaching the last eight, the one player that stood out was of course Chidi, who scored a hattrick and set up the other two goals. The Nigerian has now scored 17 goals in 18 starts in the AFC Cup and I-League in this calendar year and Morgan was full of praise for his star striker.

“I liked him the first year when I came to Indian football and I feel he is the best foreign striker in India with his back to goal. I tried to sign him in the second season but we finally got him this time and his improvement since the turn of the year isn’t a surprise because he is a quality player who scores and gives assists. Also I think Andrew (Barisic) has played a big part in his (Chidi’s) fine form because he takes away a lot of the pressure and often doesn’t get the credit because he doesn’t score the same number of goals,” the Englishman opined.