Akshay Tandon, president of FC Goa quoted Kelly Clarkson during his closing dinner speech. Addressing players and support staff and all present from the club he spoke lines from the Clarkson song, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ and finished his speech on that note while giving his toast to the season end.
So as this season ends, the next one begins. So where does the management want to take the club now? Operations Manager of FC Goa Rahul Rodrigues, alumni of the University of Liverpool who studied MBA in Football Industries, says the management has begun introspecting on the bad season. “The team management, as in Jaydev Mody and his company bought FC Goa which was a product in distress and in complete shambles from the loss of last year to the legal battles, fines and bad image. And to start from there, it was a difficult task, but to end on a good resounding win is a huge positive”, said Rodrigues
Rodrigues explained that the current focus is to address and study each issue faced by the club, players and the coach. And only then these conversations will help in introspecting the failure and later the decision would be taken on retention of players and team management.
The late start to the season obviously meant missing out on key players who already signed for other clubs. Also the fines and rebuilding networks ate into a lot of the finance of the club thus leaving the network with too few funds to pick good talent and scout new players.
And then there were misunderstandings and fallouts. Looking at the friction between Lucio and Zico, Rodrigues ascertained that every club goes through good and bad, and when the club is in a downfall, there are blame-games, tiffs and disagreement which leave people angry. Playing off the concern, he admitted that both are legends and stars and will sort their issues out over a course of time.
Meanwhile, FC Goa plans to reach out and build a relationship with the SAG, GFA and GFDC and the focus now for the club is to get all that right.
Dispelling talk of the new owners not being Goan and not connecting with the fans in some manner, he stated, “The previous owners were Dempos who loved their football and knew their football. Here Modi loves football and has been willing to extend his business acumen and invest from his business empire into Goan football where he resides and the returns can’t be counted overnight but will take some time.”
As they say, one baby step at a time and what better way than to formally launch an U 10 league immediately after their last league game.
