Al Seeb won the AFC Cup in 2022 and have no points yet, and East Bengal play them twice in a week

East Bengal have one point from two games in Group D of the AFC Champions League Two, and the next two come against the only side below them. They play Al Seeb at Al Seeb Stadium in Oman on Tuesday, 27 October, with kick-off at 9:30 pm IST, and the two teams meet again in Kolkata on 3 November.

Al Seeb have lost both of their group games without scoring. They went down 1-0 to Al Shorta in Baghdad and then lost 3-0 at home to Al Hussein of Jordan.

Bottom of the group, but not a soft draw

The table hides who they are, though. Al Seeb are the reigning champions of Oman, with five league titles in the last seven seasons, and in 2022 they won the AFC Cup, the competition that has since been renamed the ACL Two. Romanian coach Florin Motroc is in charge.

Indian football has seen them recently. In August 2025 they came to Margao for last season’s ACL Two preliminary round and lost 2-1 to FC Goa, with Dejan Dražić and Javier Siverio scoring for Goa and Nasser Al Rawahi pulling one back.

How East Bengal got here

East Bengal started the group with a 2-2 draw against Al Hussein in Amman on 16 September. Then came the 3-2 home defeat to Al Shorta on 13 October, a game they led at half-time through two David Lalhlansanga goals before conceding twice in two minutes early in the second half.

Their league form since has been the opposite. They beat Churchill Brothers 4-0 to open their ISL title defence and won 5-1 against Inter Kashi in Pune on Friday, 23 October, with Aké Loba scoring twice. Antonio López Habas took Bipin Singh and Mohammed Rashid off at half-time in that game, and he was open about why.

“We are thinking about the next match in ACL Two,” Habas said afterwards. “I had to think about the workload, possible injuries ahead of the next match. I had to control the minutes.”

Asked whether Loba would start in Oman, Habas said he would speak to the players first. “We have a lot of matches, and we will have to rotate players for different competitions,” he added. The squad went straight from Pune to Mumbai and were due to fly to Oman on Saturday.

Why Tuesday matters so much

The top two in each group go through to the round of 16, which is played in February. Al Shorta lead the group with six points and Al Hussein have four, and they play each other in Baghdad later on Tuesday night. Whatever happens there, one of them will drop points or both will.

That is East Bengal’s opening. A win in Oman would take them to four points, and then Al Seeb come to Kolkata a week later. Anything less than a win on Tuesday, and I think second place starts to slip away, because the last two group games are against Al Shorta and Al Hussein. Habas managed his players’ minutes in Pune with this game in mind. Now they have to justify it.

More on East Bengal and Indian clubs in Asia