#8 Alexandre Guimaraes
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Mumbai City FC had not made the knockouts in the first two years of the ISL. They finished 7th in both the seasons and never threatened the top teams. Till their last game of ISL 2015, they hadn’t won a single away game.
So, for the Costa Rican, Guimaraes, it was a tough challenge to walk into. But he came in and changed most things at Mumbai. The squad this year was almost unrecognisable from what it was last year and the football certainly was.
Mumbai conceded eight goals in 14 games of the league stage and very rarely looked threatened by any team. That, in no small part, is down to the excellence of Guimaraes. He brought in players like Lucian Goian and Krisztian Vadocz who formed the spine of the team and that spine was as solid as any other in the ISL.
Mumbai eventually lost in the semifinal to Atletico de Kolkata but Guimaraes’s set-up in both games cannot be questioned. That is because Mumbai scored two goals in the away leg and they would have fancied scoring the goals to beat Kolkata at home.
At home too, they were set up perfectly, but they missed a few gilt-edged opportunities to exit the tournament that they had so dominated. Also, Diego Forlan’s suspension because of the red card he picked up in the first leg was a massive blow to Mumbai.
