WHEN I accepted an offer to manage Bengaluru in the summer of 2022, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted my team to play.
High intensity. High press. Winning the ball high up the pitch. I had this vision of short, sharp training sessions with everybody playing at full tilt.
Then I got there. Bangalore is in the south of India, about 900 miles north of the equator. The temperature is regularly above 30 degrees. The humidity is off the charts.
I quickly realised I’d have to think again. For example, we started off doing a keep-ball session, a four-minute segment that you repeat four times.
The players were shattered, not because they were unfit but because the humidity meant they just couldn’t get the oxygen into their bodies. That got cut to two minutes pretty much instantly.
Exhausting
Then there was the travelling. We were flying anything from 50 minutes for a ‘local’ game to three-and-a-half hours to play someone on the other side of the country.
The whole thing - fighting through traffic, getting through the airport, getting to a hotel at the other end and then trying to train - was exhausting.
You ended up being away for three or four days and you don’t realise until it’s happening how much that takes out of you. It made recovery a much more important part of your thinking, in a way that nobody in the UK really has to contend with.
Things like that meant you were learning on the spot all the time, constantly having to grasp new ideas and adapt the way you work. I honestly think it’s made me a much better coach and I loved every minute of my time there.
Professionally, we enjoyed a lot of success. We went from winning the Durand Cup and then having an average start to winning 11 or 12 games on the bounce to reach the play-off final.
We lost that on penalties, got to a Super Cup final -
