AFC Under 19 Championship

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trojan
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AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by trojan »

India is currently playing in the SAFF U 18 Championship in Bhutan. In the first match played today India lost 3-4 to Bangladesh. Despite all the hype in recent days on development of football at grassroots, khelo India, mission XI and all, if we can't beat the likes of Bangladesh convincingly then there's something seriously wrong in India's approach towards sports development.

India will play AFC U19 qualifiers in November and there have been reports that the team for that event will include players from the U17 squad as well.

Although Indian junior teams seem to have progressed technically and fitness wise as compared to the Senior National team but the other Asian teams are progressing at a much faster pace and India hasn't been able to match their pace.
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Re: AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by jayakris »

trojan wrote: Mon Sep 18, 2017 5:43 pmIndia is currently playing in the SAFF U 18 Championship in Bhutan. In the first match played today India lost 3-4 to Bangladesh. Despite all the hype in recent days on development of football at grassroots, khelo India, mission XI and all, if we can't beat the likes of Bangladesh convincingly then there's something seriously wrong in India's approach towards sports development.
There has been something seriously wrong in grassroot football in India, and that simply could not have changed overnight, despite all the talk and hype. The hype, whatever ISL has been doing, and the semi-lucky "managed ranking streak" we have had with the senior team, can all help correct some of our grassroots issues in the long run but that is still a multiple-decades process. But the grassroots problem Indian football has been facing is much worse than what other sports have faced due to "India's approach to sports development". Football's problems has mainly had only to do with one thing, and really only one thing for 30 to 35 years. Cricket. How few kids in India play football, and how many fields, streets and backyards where football used to be played 40 years ago see only kids' cricket now, will tell you what our problem is. Losing rural Kerala and Bengal hurts, even if we gained players from places where cricket probably isn't the only thing that matters (the northeast).

We may still see improvements simply because there is a lot of modern thinking and general modernity that has come into Indian sports, and we have actually closed the gap a little bit with the world on that too. But the basic problem is that we are probably no better than many countries with 1/30th of our population, when it comes to the number of kids with sufficient hours of football experience by age 15. That won't change easily when cricket is around. But focused and professionally-run junior leagues in targeted populations of some selected 50 million people in India can be still done. It is not being done, but if it is done, we could have a top-50 quality team regularly in about 20 years time. All the hype now could possibly lead to this, I hope. Ad I know I may be hoping for too much of sense of reality among Indians for that.

But we will never solve our football problem, till we admit that cricket is the reason, and intelligently deal with it. We are not going to take cricket out of Indian kids' heart, and there is no need for it either (cricket is a great game too), but there are probably still enough Indian kids with whom to build a world top-50 team, IF we target our focus properly. We'll have to wait and see. The current "overall strategy" of just improving soccer facilities/stadia all over the country with a good professional league and other things won't matter much in the end. The problem still lies in the backyards and street corners in India. I hve been repeating this for years though...
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Re: AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by jayakris »

Here is the format and match schedules of the AFC u19 qualification event. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_AFC_ ... lification

We had a pretty bad first outing in the group matches, losing 0-5 against Saudi Arabia. We play Yemen next, tomorrow (Nov 6th).
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Re: AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by jayakris »

The India-Yemen match is on. You can watch it on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKbW3XK7dbE

Half-time: 0-0. Pretty even match so far. No real shots by either team. We have had a few more corners, and some good runs but no hardly ay shots at the goal. Yemen has had a couple of weak shots at Dheeraj, and that's it. This can go either way.

Final: 0-0. We get a point, but barring a big score win against Turkmenistan and a big loss by Yemen to S. Arabia, we can't advance.
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Re: AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by Tolamu »

India beat Turkmenistan 3-0(goals by Amarjit, Halder, Lalrindika) to get 4pts. Unless S Arabia bt Yemen by a margin of 6 goals, India is out of reckoning for best 2nd placers. Unfortunately by HT, Yemen is leading 1-0.
However, credible performance by India.

Will these wins be counted for FIFA ranking points?
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Re: AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by jayakris »

Oh shoot, for some reason I thought the game was tomorrow and missed watching it today. That is a pretty good win. Basically we were as good as Yemen based on playing each other to a 0-0 tie, and the scores against the common opponent Turkmenistan. But the mistakes that caused a big 0-5 loss to S. Arabia in the first match is hurting us badly. Yes, a pretty decent show, considering that the main players were guys from our u17 team that we are grooming now. I saw some of them pay very well the other day, compared to some of the older players who seemed to just be there. So, I am okay with how things turned out in the last 2 matches. Wish we could put in at least one goal in against Yemen, and we were close on a couple of occasions late in the game.

No, Tolamu, there are no FIFA points for this. They don't try to keep any world rankings for the junior levels.
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Re: AFC Under 19 Championship

Post by prasen9 »

For the sake of completeness, Saudi beat Yemen 2-1 at the end.

If we had won by one goal against Yemen and lost 0-1 or 1-2 to Saudi, even then we would have been in some sort of huge tie-breaker against Malayasia, Cambodia, and Uzbekistan. I think Malayasia had a 4-4 goal difference and qualified. The tie-breaker after goal-difference is goals scored. So, we would have had to score 4 goals or more! That would have been hard to do against Yemen and Saudi. The only reasonable solution would have been to defeat Yemen 2-0 and lose by a goal to Saudi. Or beat Yemen 1-0 and draw with Saudi. None of these scenarios against Saudi was remotely possible :-(
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