Pune: Blackburn Rovers head coach Tony Mowbray hopes young footballer Aniket Jadhav’s time with the club will have provided him with the ‘building blocks’ for a future career. But the coach also noticed the youth’s shortcomings like lacking in peripheral vision about what teammates were doing without looking at them. Jadhav, who hails from Maharashtra’s Kolhapur and plays for Jamshedpur FC, was the first professional Indian player to train in England, after arriving at Rovers’ Academy for a three-month spell in early March.
To aid his development, he was invited to join in with a first team training session ahead of the season finale against Swansea, and Mowbray believes that Jadhav would have benefited 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,” the manager cum head coach was quoted as saying in a release issued Thursday. “He’s only a young boy, but he showed 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.
“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 coach noted. “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,” Mowbray said. Jadhav had represented India during the Under-17 FIFA World Cup held in India in 2017.
