With every club having finally played at least one game in the 2023 Durand Cup (holders Bengaluru FC played their first game on Monday), ESPN looks at a few talking points to have emerged from the first 10-odd days of action:

Why doesn’t every club take the Durand Cup seriously?

What would you consider the main aims of a pre-season for a football club?

  • Get the squad together and work on them for an extended period?

  • Have them play a few matches, preferably ones that get their competitive juices flowing?

  • Mix and match the teams, allow your best youngsters more game-time with the seniors while also testing their mettle?

If the answer for all the above is yes (and there’s no real reason why it shouldn’t be) then the Durand Cup is a perfectly set-up pre-season tournament. You face a mix of opponents here from the willing-but-not-quite-as-skilled to your peers with the one common factor being intensity. And there’s recent evidence that it works: Take Bengaluru FC last season – young Sivasakthi Narayan’s exploits in their Cup triumph played a pivotal role in him eventually benching the great Sunil Chhetri over the course of the season.

Which makes it a little surprising that they are one of the ISL teams (Jamshedpur FC and Odisha FC being the others) who have only sent a reserve squad to the tournament. Most other teams, including the defending ISL champions and league shield winners Mohun Bagan and Mumbai City, have their first team squads (with a healthy mix of promising youngsters) and you can see them work out the wrinkles in real time. Why choose to miss out on the party?

The contrasting visions of the Kolkata giants

Mohun Bagan are the Indian Super League (ISL) champions. But they also play some of the dullest football in the league. This is not necessarily a criticism, but if you take a look at the squad (and indeed the logic in replacing Antonia Habas with Juan Ferrando mid-season two years ago), this is a club that quite clearly is desperate to win in style.

Just look at the three highest profile Indian additions to the squad – Sahal Abdul Samad (India’s most flamboyant playmaker), Anirudh Thapa (one of the nation’s best midfielders and the erstwhile creative engine of Chennaiyin FC), and Anwar Ali (easily the best ball-playing defender in the country) – and you can make that connect without much of a leap.

So, even if it’s pre-season, when they struggle to a 0-1 loss while having less possession than an East Bengal side built to play on the counter, questions will be asked. Ferrando was furious about his methods being questioned last season, and he had the ISL Cup to hold on to support his anger; but the issue with playing-to-win is that winning is mandatory. And that ramps up the pressure exponentially. Can he deliver more aesthetically-pleasing football in the coming months?

On the other side of the maidan, the demands are far more basic. And that means East Bengal are already affording Carles Cuadrat cult status. For one, he led them to their first senior team derby win in eight attempts (a lifetime for an EB fan) and for the other, his methods are unfussy and easy to get behind. Sit deep, defend well, aim for efficiency in attack, use your set-pieces well and fight for everything: considering the squad they have and even more pertinently their ISL history, that’s all EB fans want their team to do.

Kerala derby a good advert for the neutral

A seven-goal thriller is exactly how you’d have wanted the first-ever senior-team level Kerala derby to be played out between Kerala Blasters and Gokulam Kerala. The latter team won by the odd goal (4-3), but it was a tight affair towards the end, in a game that gave both plenty to take away.

The Blasters desperately need to work on a traditional weakness of theirs, transition defence, while Gokulam will worry about how fast their defence caved with talismanic captain Aminou Bouba off the pitch.

But the goals were brilliant (especially Abhijith’s for Gokulam) and some of the skill on display was delicious (take a bow, Blasters youngster Aimen), and there was just enough tension in the air to make it the kind of advert the Durand Cup could have used. It screamed: ‘watch this tournament, it’s genuinely fun.’

P.S. Of the I-League clubs playing this tournament, Gokulam look best primed to take back the trophy they’d won twice in the last three years.

FC Goa and Chennaiyin show promise…

Neither Manolo Marquez’s nor Owen Coyle’s quality are up for much debate, and they’ve started their gigs at FC Goa and Chennaiyin FC respectively pretty well.

Marquez has Goa playing some smooth, if currently error-ridden football, but this is a manager that asks his players to embrace risk and freedom and the short teaser we’ve seen is quite promising. It’s the same case for Coyle’s Chennaiyin, who seem to have rediscovered some oomph in an attack that has sputtered and stalled ever since he left them back in 2019.

The new signings seem to be settling in nicely for both teams and the longer they play together, you can see them playing the kind of attacking, entertaining football their managers crave.

…As do NorthEast United, for once

Six goals in two games? A Goal Difference of +4? A hard-fought draw against FC Goa? Hello, Juan Pedro Benali!

It’s been a promising start for the new manager who’s looking to transform a team that’d turned into the league’s punching bag over the past couple of years.

To release or not release… the U23 players

Igor Stimac, head coach of the national team, tweeted this a day after the start of the Durand Cup:

Even if we keep aside the debate of whether senior players can be released for two whole months in the middle of an ISL season, there is enough to unpack in Stimac’s ask to release U23 players now… which was then refused by the ISL clubs. Considering those are the clubs who’ve taken point (a) of this article seriously, you can see why – they want their team to gel, to work things out before a tough season begins and they are under no obligation to release their most promising players. Plus, you can see it’s working.

Arguably they shouldn’t even have been put in a position to refuse the call; this is after all a designated pre-season time in the AIFF calendar.