Team Analysis: Taylor retains team balance, spruces up forward line to emerge stronger

KERALA BLASTERS CAME titillatingly close to winning the ISL title in the inaugural season. They got to the final, dominated most of the game, and then got sucker-punched by a low header from Mohammen Rafique. The regret of having come so close, yet failed, will be a major motivation for them to go that extra mile and get it done this season. 

But how did they get to the final? It wasn't by playing an aggressive variety of football. It wasn't by scoring lots of goals, and eliminating opponents left, right and centre. In fact, in the regular season, they scored only 9 goals in 14 matches, the lowest in the tournament.

But they also let in only 11 goals. Another ISL lowest.

Thirteen out of 14 of those regular season games were either draws or decided by a 1 goal margin. Goalkeeper-manager David James, who earned 6 clean sheets for the Blasters, kept the defence air-tight and played an economic brand of football that just about got them into the semi-finals. It wasn't terribly exciting and one goal here or there could have thrown them out of top four. That's not a risk you want to live with for the second successive year.

Which meant that when Peter Taylor got the job, his task was to maintain that defensive stability and optimize the goal-scoring department as much as possible. He began on the right track by replacing the entire forward line (well he probably wanted to keep Iain Hume, but got snatched by ATK on that one) and holding onto 7 successful defenders and midifielders, 6 of them Indians. 

Renowned for his keen eye for talent, Peter Taylor sought to mould the forward line with the right balance of ability and experience, without compromising on fitness. This lead to the signing of relatively young strikers, like Chris Dagnall and Sanchez Watt, who have less impressive clubs on their resumes, but have the potential to take on the intensive ISL season without succumbing to fatigue. 

In the midfield and defence, Taylor was a bit more in favour of experience. Their marquee player, Carlos Marchena, is the oldest player in the block at 36, and in spite of being the right kind of versatile defender/defensive medio Blasters would want to have on the field, they will be without him at the start of the season as the Spaniard suffered an injury during training.

But that is not to say Kerala Blasters will miss him too much as long as they have their effective defensive trio from last season still working for them; namely Sandesh Jhingan (recently voted the Best Indian Player of ISL 2014), Saumik Dey, and Gurwinder Singh. But Sandesh Jhingan will be missing from their first three games due to national duty; so they will have to depend on the likes of Peter Ramage and Marcus Williams to fill in for him. Which is not the worst thing in the world.

But one thing that has been bothering fans ever since the team got built is the fact that most of the Blasters' foreigners, especially the 5 English players Taylor brought along with him, have no experience whatsoever of playing in the Indian subcontinent. Taylor sought to address this by choosing to hold their pre-season on home soil, in Trivandrum. This gave his new players, and himself, a chance to acclimatise to the conditions ahead of the start of the season. Whether it worked or not won't be clear until the ball is set rolling, but so far the Blasters have done well in friendlies against lower league clubs. 

Peter Taylor has made this Kerala Blasters side his own, but retained the sense of balance from the previous season. Though at first glance the team will appear to have less glamour and fire-power than most other ISL franchises, the presence of a seasoned coach and the durability of young players might just make them one of the major threats of the season. They have the advantage of a defence that's been proven to work, a competent midfield where both Indians and foreigners pitch in, and a forward line of young strikers at the height of their careers, who have, at least on paper, everything it takes to reverse the debacle that was the Kerala Blasters attack last season. 

The inaugural ISL was full of upsets, and Kerala Blasters are one of the sides more likely sides to inflict them this year. It is very likely that you might see them in the final again, come December.