After a hard-fought battle ending in favour of Jamshedpur FC with a perfect finishing late goal and the team heading to the top of the table after acquiring the winning points, a content Owen Coyle talks about Ishan Pandita’s brilliant performance, SC East Bengal defensive’s display and the thrilling league so far.

Here are the excerpts from the post match interview:

Thoughts on Ishan’s late winner that secured another win

That is the reason I brought him to the football club; he is a wonderful player. He is only going to get better moving forward and he has been working his socks off in training everyday to be in the starting line-up. He has already registered a considerable amount of playing time under his belt as well. He had a couple of niggly injuries early in the season but now we can see he is flowing and moving well with the ball. He had a couple of chances before he actually got his first goal of the season but the header tonight shows that he’s a natural finisher. If I could keep adding elements to his game now, then the Indian national team is going to have a fantastic number 9 in their team for sure. He is a wonderful lad to work with a great attitude and his teammates adore him because of his qualities and him being a team player. So I cannot speak highly enough about him and he has completely merited that. People say he deserves it and he earned that tonight. He placed himself in the right spot and put in a brilliant header which shows us what he can do. He is truly a wonderful talent.

Thoughts on SC East Bengal’s resilient approach on the field

An all Indian squad is something SC East Bengal have been playing with lately apart from the time that Chima played in one of the previous games. But they have drawn 4 out of the 5 games against Mumbai City FC, Hyderabad FC, Bengaluru FC and the only game that they lost was against NorthEast United FC when they had a player sent off reducing them to 10 men. They have shown how tough they are to beat and they kept us at bay till the end of the game. But that does not mean we could not have scored earlier in the game as we could have easily had 3-4 goals tonight but we were denied with a couple of good saves, deflection off of the woodwork and other things. But, there is no doubt that we are winners and should have scored a lot more than we actually did. The important thing was that I told the lads that it might take us 95 minutes to win the game, so we have to be patient and not get frustrated, which we did a couple of times during the game. But overall, it was another outstanding performance displayed by Jamshedpur FC.

Thoughts on being table toppers after the hard-fought win

It is nice to be on top of the table but every team wants to be on the top after 20 games and we have undergone only 11 till now. But we would rather be on top than not be there at all and we know we have merited that. We also feel we should have probably had more points than we already do considering some of our earlier performances. We lost the game against Chennaiyin FC which we dominated and then some other games that were drawn that we should have won but that is in the past now. We know that we can go toe-to-toe with the best teams and we just have to make sure we are moving forward, working equally hard and being clinical in front of the goal. We are looking to add another player to the team and once that happens, then there will be more competition for places within the squad.

Thoughts on the league having a new team on top of the table everyday

That is something that will happen as there are some very good teams in the league which makes it very competitive and that is something that everyone wants. We want to grow and develop the Hero ISL and I think this year has been a fantastic year with some amazing individual performances, brilliant goals, promotion of the young Indian talents coming in; I don't think there's any doubt that the league is only going to get better going forward. Every team playing right now is going to aim for the winning points as they are fighting for the top spots which is what makes the league an interesting and fantastic watch for the fans. For our part, we want to make sure we win as many points as possible to end the season at the top end of the table.