By: Rajeeb Mukherjee

The clock was winding down and the crowd was getting restless. Goals were hard to come by, shots were at a premium and the game listless. Behind the Atletico de Kolkata goal, Alessandro Del Piero was busy juggling with the ball. First with his right foot and then with the left. If he had harboured hopes of playing in Delhi Dynamos’ last home game in this edition of the Indian Super League — it will remain so if they don’t make it to the semi-finals — then coach Harm van Veldhoven had other ideas. So Del Piero watched the last of the substitution being played out, and then trudged back towards the dug out.

Not known to vent out his anger publicly, Del Piero stood for a while and with the match finishing goalless, walked up to some of the kids waiting close to the touchline, shook hands and joked with them before walking away.

Chants of ‘Del Piero’ were no more to be heard, the hysteria that accompanied his arrival having long vanished and only to be replaced by a sense of disillusionment. While the league’s ambassador was relegated to the position of an onlooker, Atletico de Kolkata’s marquee player Luis Garcia was perhaps surprised to find himself in a similar situation. He has been the engine that drives Kolkata, but coach Antonio Lopez Habas chose to keep him out of the equation at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on Tuesday. Garcia spent most of the second half standing behind the Delhi goal, watching opportunities go by.

Without him the team did come up with some decent chances — like the one Baljit Sahni shot wide in the 18th minute or when Joffre’s header from a Borja Fernandes lob was kept out by Kristof Van Hout in the Delhi goal at the fag end of the match. However, those were few and far between.

Kolkata had come to Delhi looking for a win, and truth be told, a point is not all that bad given that a semi-final place is their for the losing. So it made sense from the coach’s point of view not to risk Garcia and preserve him for more important matches. But it robbed Delhi of some quality in the middle without which the game gradually lost its impetus.

Delhi tried their bit. They were the ones who desperately needed the win before they hit the road for their last two league matches. They did start with a flurry, Gustavo dos Santos teasing and troubling down the right with his pace and skill. But despite possessing a fairly gifted left foot, he ain’t no Messi.

Hence, efforts to drift in and attempt a quick one-two or weave his way in through a maze of legs got stuck, in those very legs, and Delhi lost the momentum. But when he went down the flanks, dos Santos was his most dangerous.

He came close to breaking the deadlock close to the hour mark but his snapshot was parried away by a diving Apoula Bete in the Kolkata goal. With Dos Santos hugging the touchline, it stretched Kolkata’s defence and allowed Francis Fernandes and Mads Junker to drift into space. But poor application cost Delhi three points.