Think I am born for this, says FC Goa coach Derrick Pereira

It fits that the man who thinks his pathway as coach was “planned by somebody up above” and who took charge for the first time this season on Christmas Eve would be reading the Bible now. Given how things are stacked, Derrick Pereira wouldn’t mind some divine intervention.

FC Goa don’t have a strength and conditioning coach after Javi Gonzalez moved with Juan Ferrando to ATK Mohun Bagan. They are the only team in this iteration of the Indian Super League (ISL) not to have kept a clean sheet. They began with three successive defeats and just when Ferrando looked to be turning things around with two wins and a draw, he activated the release clause in his contract. Up next for Pereira is Ferrando who was with FC Goa from 2020-21 and had taken them to the semi-final. Also, ever since ATK and Mohun Bagan merged, FC Goa haven’t won against them. 

And till after Wednesday’s game, Pereira is in “soft quarantine". That means masking up in the technical area and not getting “too close” to match officials. It also means no supervising training sessions and being allowed only five minutes in the change room after warm-up and five minutes into half-time. 

If Pereira, a former India defender who played 18 seasons with Salgaocar and coached them for two, is rattled by this he isn’t showing it. “I think I am born for this,” he said instead. Late in the Zoom interview, he also said: “We want to show we are footballing force in the country.” 

This isn’t the first time Pereira, 59, has been thrust into the hot seat. “Even for the India under-23 team I hardly got time. I don’t think anybody else would have taken the assignment because there was no time to train the boys, no time to select the players, no time to put in a plan. Some players joined the team on the day of our travel. Then at Churchill too (it was the same). And the year before, I had to step in for the end of the season (at FC Goa),” he said. 

 In 2019, Pereira took charge of the national U23 team for the Asian qualifiers, the first assignment in a two-year tenure. In 2016-17, he took over as Churchill Brothers coach when they were last in the I-League. They finished sixth. And at FC Goa, when the club removed Sergio Lobera as coach just ahead of the semi-finals of the 2019-20 ISL, Pereira and Clifford Miranda oversaw a dramatic 5-6 loss on aggregate. 

Coaching through quarantine 

But there is a lot of difference between 2019-20 and now, he said. “Earlier we had a team which was pretty set and I just had to go with the flow.” Now, he would need time to “study and understand the players especially the younger lot.” It is one thing to see the team as FC Goa technical director and head of youth development and quite another to get “closer to the players, the technical staff.” 

“(Also) this is midseason and suddenly the coach leaves; how will the players react? But when I joined here I spoke to the players, the staff and I got the feeling I had when I started coaching at the age of 37,” he said. Then, he would be buzzing with ideas. Like he is now. 

“In this quarantine, I have been thinking, making notes, talking to the players, taking their feedback,” he said. FC Goa, he said, would continue to play like they are known to from the time of Lobera in 2017: build from the back and keep possession to create opportunity. If tweaks needs to be made, it will be specific to the opposition, he said. 

Pereira is among three Indian coaches in ISL8 along with Khalid Jamil (NorthEast United) and Renedy Singh (SC East Bengal). “Like the players are exposed to a higher level (in ISL), young Indian coaches too should be exposed to a certain level to help them make decisions. At this level it is more about man management and if that can be taken care of we will get Indian coaches (in ISL),” he said. 

“I was fortunate. I got teams to build myself. My pathway was well planned by somebody up above.” In four seasons with Mahindra United, Pereira won the National League, Federation Cup and IFA Shield twice. That was after he spent five seasons at Vasco and was followed by stints at FC Pune, DSK Shivajians and Salgaocar. 

Indian coaches might not get enough opportunities at ISL but players are after the number of foreigners were reduced to four this term. While that is good for exposure, “we still need to work at the grassroots. There are very few players coming through the ranks.” 

Federation, league should step in 

Working at the grassroots is something FC Goa are known for. Not many are. “If the clubs have the passion, (they will work on this). When I was recruited, our president Akshay Tandon and the management said, “we want to have our local talent play for the first team, for the national team.” 

And for those teams that don’t have the drive, the federation or the league has to step in, he said. There are certain things in place such as club licensing criteria “but are the teams serious about it?” If not, maybe the criteria needs to be restructured. “Every year we have to sit, analyse this so that we can focus on the development if Indian football.”

One way of working on harnessing grassroots talent is to get clubs to recruit a majority of their development team players from their area. “There is lot of interest shown in states not usually associated with football such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan. We got a lot of registrations from these states (at FC Goa’s age-specific teams). So there is football, we need to create opportunities for those kids in their state,” he said. “Also, besides the local league there has to be inter-state leagues to help young players grow.” 

Of the five clubs Pereira has coached since starting in 2000, Pune FC, Mahindra United and DSK Shivajians have been disbanded and Vasco along with Salgaocar and Churchill Brothers are not in the top two tiers of Indian football. One of the reasons for that is not being able to harness support. 

Support for teams in Goa are region-specific, said Pereira. “South of Goa would support Salgaocar, central Goa Vasco, north would Dempo. Japan also had these company teams and they were asked to get attached to one state. That we failed to do. That way people would have got involved with them. 

“The second part is that AIFF was not very helpful in convincing them to continue. That was my thinking. If AIFF could find a way to get Mahindra, Pune to continue, make them feel they are part of the development of Indian football I think they would have been still there,” he said.