Kushal Das, the general secretary of the All India Football Federation and Abhishek Yadav, the director of national teams, addressed the media in New Delhi on Monday to make their case for India’s inclusion in the Asian Games to be held in Jakarta and Palembang in August.
With a considerable amount of grappling taking place between the AIFF and the IOA, Das and Yadav tried to blame the Indian Olympic body but failed to make a footballing argument for the same.
Kushal Das: “Eleven players in the senior national team setup are Under-23 and immediately after the Asian Games we head to the SAFF Championship where a significant number of youth players will be part of the squad. Moving ahead, in 2019 we have the AFC U-23 Qualifiers and this would have been a great learning exposure for the players.”
The argument of exposure is a flimsy one and to suggest that the football teams will use the Asian Games as exposure, when every other Indian sportsperson will be competing for a medal, is a disservice to the idea of sending a competitive team that is capable of bringing home a piece of silverware.
Of the 11 U-23 players that Kushal Das talks about in the national team, only three – Subashish Bose, Udanta Singh and Anirudh Thapa – were regular starters in the recently concluded Intercontinental Cup. Prior to that, Udanta was the only player under 23 years of age who was getting regular game-time at the international level.
Stephen Constantine was in charge of the Indian team that failed to make it to the AFC U-23 Championship, and the Englishman has picked several players from that squad for debuts but only Thapa has cemented his place in the team.
If exposure for the Asian Cup was what the federation and the coach were after, the Intercontinental Cup, where teams like Chinese Taipei, Kenya and New Zealand sent young, under-strength squads, was a perfect testing ground. But Constantine opted for his full-strength squad in three of the four matches, and reverted to his preferred XI in the fourth, halfway through.
If exposure for the AFC U-23 qualifiers was what the AIFF were after, only Ashique Kuruniyan (21) of Das’s mentioned 11 will be eligible for the AFC U-23 Championships to be held in 2020.
Abhishek Yadav: “We were considering calling up U-17 World Cup players for the preparatory Camp for the Asian Games. The Indian Arrows’ players, who have the experience of playing in the World Cup and the I-League, represent the next generation of Indian Football. The Asian Games would have been a huge experience for them which would have served Indian Football in the long run.”
Too much emphasis has been put on a single age group and the team associated with it. This team has now been part of multiple exposure tours prior to the World Cup and would have been part of many more had they not failed to qualify for the AFC U-19 Championships.
Yadav’s claim that the team which lost all three of its matches at the U-17 World Cup and then failed to qualify for a tournament with the 16 best Asian teams, seems a bit tenuous when you consider the current make-up of the national team.
At the moment, Jerry Lalrinzuala at 19 is the youngest member of the senior team and Sunil Chhetri at 33 is the oldest. An age-group team of 23 players is spread across 14 years, and have 10 players aged 25 or above. For the officials to keep repeating that a set of players in a single age group would effectively serve the national team in the future is foolhardy. For the director of national teams to claim that the team which couldn’t compete at the U-16 and U-19 level in Asia would suddenly step up to the U-23 level is a prayer for a miracle.
The Indian Arrows, which comprises most of these players, don’t play regularly with the best Indian footballers like the rest of their peers in other countries. They play in the I-League, along with only two out of the 23-strong recent senior national squad, an indicator of the relative strengths of the two leagues.
In fact, the number of Under-21 players in the ISL and the game-time that they got over this past season deserves to be looked at. Only Jerry Lalrinzuala, Lallinzuala Chhangte, Vinit Rai, Rupert Nongrum, Sarthak Golui and Jerry Mawimingthanga of the Indian players under 21 managed to play 50% or more of their team’s minutes. Structural changes and not fixes aimed at a single group of players are what is required at the moment.
Das: “There has been a significant effort to improve the women’s team.”
Nope. The women have played only two friendlies in the last five years. Apart from those friendlies, their only other competition has been the SAFF Championships way back in 2015 and the South Asian Games at home in 2016, neither providing capable opposition for the team to test itself against.
When India played at the World Cup and Asian Cup qualifiers at Pyongyang in 2017, the team lost their first three matches by a combined margin of 25-1. The Indian Women’s League, started in 2017, has seen teams drop out and play a maximum seven matches per season.
For all the talk of effort, the women barely play 10 games at the highest level.
Das: “Top 8 finish at the last Asian Games, which is four years back. How can you compare what happened four years back and now? If the criteria is top 8, we are 13th. We are not too far away. You cannot say we are not in medal contention. Had we been 25 maybe, I would have said okay, fair enough. This was the case four years ago.
Both Constantine and Chhetri have warned, as of the previous month, not to take rankings seriously. Yet, to make it a premise of his argument to push the team’s case is a serious flaw. Fifa’s updated methodology will mean that the team’s current ranking (97) will move towards its Elo ranking (159) if it does not start playing and winning against stronger opponents in the future.
The flaw in Fifa’s previous ranking system has been explained here, and further exemplified by the fact that India were comprehensively defeated by Kyrgyzstan, who are 154th overall and 22nd in Asia in the Elo rankings.
To say that four years has brought a massive change is also misleading. At the U23 AFC qualifiers in 2013, a team consisting of Alwyn George, Jeje Lalpekhlua, Romeo Fernandes and Manandeep Singh won two games out of five in a tough group containing Iraq, Oman, UAE, Lebanon and Turkmenistan.
The 2016 qualifiers saw them end up with no goals and no wins in a group containing Syria, Uzbekistan and Bangladesh. The 2018 edition saw them crash out after losing to Qatar and Syria, managing to win against Turkmenistan. All three batches of the Under-23’s have failed to qualify for the AFC U-23 tournament.
The jury on actual improvement is out, considering that 11 fully capped internationals including Thapa, Lalrinzuala, Kaith, Chhangte and Daniel Lalhlimpuia were part of the squad that failed to qualify for the AFC U-23 tournament.
Limited-time offer: Big stories, small price. Keep independent media alive. Become a Scroll member today!
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!