Could “Instead,” be used as the first word of a sentence without any following “of”?

Question

Would the following sentence be correct? If not, I am looking for an adverb to express the meaning of “instead”.

Our team could have won the match if our coach had interchanged the goal keeper after the collision. Instead, our coach decided to interchange an attacker, which proved to be a bad team management decision.

Can “Instead” and comma be used to begin a sentence, without any following “of”?

Answer 1

You could certainly use an adverb like unfortunately to emphasize that the decision was a poor one. But simply using instead with the comma is grammatically correct.