Vishnu Prasad By

Express News Service

It is early October and Chennai City FC have just finished unveiling their new jerseys at a swanky Coimbatore hotel. The mood is celebratory and the bar is open. The club’s owner Rohit Ramesh is huddled around a table with his staff when new Spanish recruit Pedro Manzi comes bursting into the room. Upon spotting his new employer, he comes over and takes a chair. During the ensuing conversation, he makes a rather grandiose announcement. “I want to help the team win the league this year.” Everyone laughs. Manzi clearly had been celebrating too much.

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It feels wrong to brand Chennai City’s season a fairy tale. Sure, it has all the markings of one. They have gone from nearly getting relegated to sitting pretty atop the I-League table, in just over 12 months. Their budget is minuscule compared to what big guns like East Bengal and Mohun Bagan have to play with. Their run comes two years after they were de facto kicked out of the city they’re named after.

‘Chennai’ City now play more than 500km away in Coimbatore because they can’t afford a stadium at home. In terms of distance, that’s the equivalent of Real Madrid playing their home games at Camp Nou. Even stranger is the style of football they’ve adopted.

When Singaporean coach Akbar Nawas decided to implement a possession-based game, there must have been a lot of disbelieving nods. Akbar was violating an assumption that so many people had repeated so many times, it had morphed into a fact — Indians can’t keep the ball. Yet it is difficult to remember a game where his team — made up mostly of players who were playing Chennai’s district league last season — hasn’t dominated possession. Against East Bengal at home, they had almost 60 per cent of the ball, against Gokulam Kerala 70 per cent. Even in the sole game they have lost all season — Real Kashmir at home — Chennai City’s possession was a whopping 78 per cent.

Yet it feels wrong to attribute this to a sprinkling of stardust or the swoosh of a wand. There is no magic trick here, no sleight of hand while your attention is lost elsewhere. This feels more like a feat of engineering. There were people who laid out plans and there were others who wouldn’t stop until they were executed.

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Akbar Nawas laughs when asked if all this is the result of his meticulousness. “Planning is key, yes. But more important is to have people who can execute those plans.”

In the topsy-turvy world of Indian football, where impatience is a virtue and where player contracts are written in months and not years, Akbar stands apart. This season, he explains, is not about the title. It’s phase one. “Phase one of my plan was to get the players to keep the ball,” he says. “Phase two is next year where they have to be a bit more effective with the ball. Phase three is when we focus on defending.”

It’s not like he wrote all this on a piece of paper before boarding the flight from Singapore to India. Akbar came to Coimbatore months before he was appointed manager and started doing his homework — his blueprint is the end result of that. He was watching, last season, as V Soundararajan’s side overcame Minerva Punjab in their final league game to ensure survival. He had just come in as a ‘technical consultant’, but his vague designation was fooling no one.

This was clearly next season’s manager. Unlike most foreign managers, Akbar did not rush to the airport the day after the season was done. He stayed behind in the sweltering Chennai summer and, alongside his then assistant Jordi Vila (a former Barcelona scout), watched the Chennai Senior Division League.

The duo dived deep into the depths of the League and came up with more than 20 players who were to make up the domestic core of next season’s squad. “That (coming in early) helped a lot,” he says. “I got a glimpse of what the league was about. That helped me shape what we wanted to do for the next season. Scouting the League and holding open trials got us around 20 players.”

Then came the hard part that few Indian clubs get right — finding the foreigners. Jordi, who has since left for MLS side New York City FC, had spent his scouting days in the Spanish enclave of the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. That was where he had stumbled upon a young Mauro Icardi. It was only natural that the duo flew to Spain to find the final pieces of the jigsaw.

“Jordi already had a list of ten players and we had to choose four,” Akbar says. The players were all from the Canary Islands, but were now playing across Spain, so Akbar and Jordi travelled the country watching lower league matches. Soon, they were putting tick marks to names. Midfielder Sandro Rodriguez came from third division side Ibarra in the Canary Islands.

Defender Roberto Eslava was playing in Salamanca, for Unionistas. Winger Nestor Gordillo came from Cornella in Jordi’s native Catalonia and was convinced to move abroad for the first time in his career.

But the most important of their signings came a few kilometres north of where they had found Gordillo, in a fourth division outfit called L’Hospitalet. Pedro Javier Manzi Cruz had been on Jordi’s radar for quite some time.

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Manzi was born in Uruguay and moved to the Canary Islands when he was 10. There is a part of him though that is neither Uruguayan nor Spanish. An ancestor migrated from Italy to South America sometime in the 18th century — it is from him that Manzi gets his surname. ‘Manzi’ in Italian means an ‘ox’ or a ‘steer’ and there is a certain ox-like quality to the 30-year-old’s game as he leaves opponent gasping in his wake.

“Jordi used to compare me to another Uruguayan — Luis Suarez,” Manzi laughs. “But of course, he is one of the best and I am here.”

Manzi has arguably been the best foreigner playing in India this year. With 13 goals (three hat-tricks), he is the I-League’s joint top-scorer, but it has not just been about quantity. His goals have come at vital stages of the season and they have, more often than not, injected just enough belief into a young team staring adversity in the face.

When Chennai City were down 1-2 to Gokulam Kerala at home, Manzi scored twice to drag them to a 3-2 victory. Last week, when they were trailing at home to East Bengal, the Spaniard scored the equaliser and set the stage for a come-from-behind win. On Friday, when his team was locked at 1-1 with Aizawl, he fired one in from 40 yards out. And like every good captain, he has made sure his doggedness rubbed off on his teammates.

“If I do not stop fighting for 90 minutes, then I think it makes defences uncomfortable,” he says. “Scoring goals is my job, but I consider myself a very mobile player who creates space for his teammates. It is hard to play 90 minutes against someone who does not know how to be still.”

Manzi has a lot of ink on his body, symbols for things he holds closest to his heart. There is an image of his mother surrounded by roses, her favourite flower. There is a clock that shows the time of his birth and a couple of swallows representing his siblings. In a couple of months, he may have to hit the parlour again to put down something to remember this season by.

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Friday saw Chennai City come up on top in another thriller — a 4-3 win over Aizawl FC. Sitting in the team hotel, Akbar has the same line when any talk of the title is brought up. ‘One game at a time’. Other officials talk about playing Real Kashmir in Kashmir next week and how their physicality was hard to deal with, the last time. Title talk can wait until then, they say. This time though, nobody is laughing.