Football: Indian National Team news ...

[arjun2761]

In the WC qualifiers, Oman beat Afghanistan 2-1, so now we only need to tie (or win) against Afghanistan in 3 days to get 3rd place in the group.

Not sure if 3rd place (behind Qatar and Oman) is worth anything but finishing behind sad teams like Bangladesh and Afghanistan wouldn't haven been good for our confidence.

[SaniaFan]

That would mean direct entry to Asian cup qualifying third and final round without any playoffs.

[Omkara]

Ideally we should beat Bangladesh and afgan teams. We dominated most of the match against Bangladesh. So we should do well against afgan too. What I like most is except Chetri most players are around 25 yrs old. We did really well against Oman,. holding on with a 10 men team. We are taking baby steps towards improvement. It's better than the uncertainties we see in tennis.

[Rajiv]

0-0 Half time against the Afghans.
Just to note under Igor Stimac, India has never lost a game being goalless or equal score at Half Time.

So a draw also would be fine to take us through to the Asian Cup qualifiers

[Omkara]

We are definitely not dominating. It's equal. Last five minutes Afgans are playing better.

We are still not a great team. We need to take a big leap. But atleast we are playing competitively.

[prasen9]

Seems like 1-1 in full-time.

[Rajiv]

Yes ended in a tie, apparently the teenager Zamani who scored a curler for the Afghan's is a cadet for Ajax.....Impressive

[jayakris]

But the draw was enough to stay at the third place in the pool and advance to the third round of the Asian Cup qualification. At least that much. Pretty much what was expected. One win and four draws for 7 points. A bit more success in finishing and a couple of goals more could have made us competitive to advance in World cup qualifying itself, but that was not to be. We still don't have a scorer other than Chhettri. How sad.

[arjun2761]

Yes, we seem to have figured out the defense and we have a good goalie. However, we don't have much quality on offense or midfield with Chettri still being our best scorer. Afghanistan had more possession than we did and slightly more dangerous attacks, so a draw seems to be a fair result. Given that Afghanistan is 149th in FIFA ranking and worse (174th) in ELO rankings, hard to consider this a good result other than helping us with the Asian Cup placement.

[Omkara]

I fully agree. Not a great result. Infact a bad one, given the Afgan team dominated. We were too focussed on our defence. Chetri is getting old. Maybe a few more years. We would do well against higher ranked teams i.e. maybe a draw against them. But our striking ability is poor. We are quite clueless in our opponents half.

[prasen9]

I would take a good defence. Given that we are a pretty bad team, having a good defence is the first step.

[Sin Hombre]

We need to bite the bullet and allow OCI/PIO to play for India. Otherwise, this is more of the same for decades to come.

[rajitghosh]

I would take a good defence. Given that we are a pretty bad team, having a good defence is the first step.

When Jhingan and Anas played together we had a good defence. Sadly that is no more the case.

[jayakris]

It seems we are having trouble finding somebody to play friendlies against, in the FIFA window coming up (Aug 30 - Sep 7). AIFF release a statement on it on Friday.

It looks like Nepal, which has no travel restrictions with India, is the only country available. They may be it.

Anyway, the national team camp is starting this weekend in Kolkata... First time in 15 years that the camp is being done there.

[arjun2761]

Yes, this is a problem. Playing low quality teams isn't going to improve our team.

That said, we really need to improve the quality of our players. It's possible that we don't have a single player that is in the top 8000 players in the world. Looking at the list of top leagues, our star goalie was a deep backup in the Norwegian league (#23 league) who never played any league matches. Our "talismanic" striker Chettri tried out and didn't make the MLS roster (#14 league) while the "legendary" Baichung Bhutia played in the 3rd/4th tier English league (#30 or #33 league). So, we don't have a single player that could make a top 20 league roster. Assuming 20 clubs with 20 players in each of the top 20 leagues, that would make 8000 players that are better than our best players....