KBFC coach Rene cautious about the clash vs Jamshedpur; hails Prasanth's performance

KERALA BLASTERS take on Jamshedpur FC in their second home game tonight. Coach Rene Meulensteen is cautious going into this game as he calls it a tough challenge.

At the pre-match press conference, he said,

"It will be a difficult match for sure. Knowing Steve (Coppell), he will have the team very well organized, he will have them working hard, he will have them very hard to break down. And the sort of style that I expect is that they will be fairly direct. So, we have to be very alert in terms of those sort of things because they can catch you off guard. We have to produce a high level of energy and more than anything a high level of quality. And this is what we’ll be working on this week."

"You can only see the real quality shining through when we’ve played a number of home games and a number of away games because I would imagine that most teams will have a slightly different approach home and away. But we’re up for the match, we know what the stadium can bring us, for us, for the players. We want to be as positive as we can, but it will be a challenge for sure."

Talking about Berbatov's role in the team, he said,

"Well, we work on different options. What we need to do is maximise the qualities that we have in front of us and then we look at opposition, in what is the best way that we can hurt them. I think that is a good thing that we have through the team; I’ve got the players that have the ability to play in various positions which helps us rotate a little bit in the frontline and that can create a little bit of unpredictability, so you don’t become too predictable to the opposition. So, I’m obviously not going to tell you whether he’s going to play there or not. But you’ll see tomorrow that we have some good attributes in the team to mix up."

Hailing Prasanth Karuthadathkuni's performance in the short cameo he did in the opening match, he said,

"Prashanth, I’d say he gave us everything that we asked for. I wish I could bring five or six on but I can only bring three players off the bench. It’s important that those substitutions have an extra-factor. That’s the key, it doesn’t matter whether you want to hold on to the points or you want to create urgency. And Prashanth has got unbelievable pace. He’s a young boy and he’s still learning, learning fast because he’s got an eagerness to learn and he can cause problems. That is exactly what I want to bring on if you talk from an attacking stance, more energy, more pace, more threat and he definitely gives you that."

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