PUNE: Blackburn Rovers Head Coach Tony Mowbray hopes Aniket Jadhav’s time with the club will have provided him with the ‘building blocks’ for a future career. However, in saying so he even opined that there are some qualities that the players lacks.
The 18-year-old Kolhapur-born lad, who plays for Jamshedpur FC, is the first professional Indian player to train in England, having arrived at Rovers’ Academy for a three-month spell in early March.
To aid his development, Aniket was invited to join in with a first team training session ahead of the season finale against Swansea and Mowbray believes the talented teenager will have benefited greatly from the experience.
“He came up and trained one afternoon and I think that would benefit him – playing with experienced professional footballers at Championship level,” said the manager cum head coach.
“He’s only a young boy, but he showed that he had good basics to his game and he was able to join in with the session. He was enthusiastic, he worked hard with the group and hopefully he enjoyed it.
“I’m sure the daily training at the Academy will have helped him. When he came up to train with us, I’m sure the messages I was giving him was something he was getting every day down at the Academy.
“I would hope that the professional level of coaching he got at an elite level Academy will stand him in good stead for the future and create habits that will hopefully become rooted and become part of the foundation of his career.
“The fine detail of football is what matters. The ability to receive the ball on the half-turn or the weight of your pass. I call them the building blocks of your career. Basic football skills that the best players you don’t even notice they do it, but they all do it naturally.
Mowbray also opined that there are some qualities which the Indian footballer lacks.
"His habits to play at the top level, the little things that he doesn't quite do naturally are quite obvious to me. He doesn't have this peripheral vision, you should be knowing what your (teammates) are doing without really turning around to look. He has to develop these things, these things come from repetition every single day, maybe for years for some people," he said.
"I played football professionally for 18-20 years. I learned my trade as a 4-10-year-old boy every day with the ball in the garden. I don't see those natural instincts that top players at his age might have developed from doing what I did - practising without practising," Mowbray added.
