Football: Indian National Team news ...

[arjun2761]

Great win for India! Though early, it puts us in a good position to advance to the 3rd stage of 18 (from which 8.5 teams qualify). While we are nowhere near one of the top 8/9 teams in Asia, we have at least a small chance if we make the 3rd stage. I wonder if there are 3-4 NRI players playing in the stronger leagues that can strengthen the Indian team.

In the 2022 cycle, we didn't advance to the 3rd stage of 12 from which 4.5 teams qualified.

[pancakesdonuts]

I just want India to qualify for Round 3 and play the big teams like Australia, South Korea, Japan, and Saudi. We will get to play 10 quality games at the international level, which will seriously raise the profile of the game

[jayakris]

Terrific win for India! Go Blue!!

Here is Manvir Singh's goal, off a perfect cross from Chhetri. Wow.

[Omkara]

Wow .... So many people in the stadium. So many indian supporters

[prasen9]

Are you getting ready to watch the big match? Who thinks we can pull one out? Can we repeat 2019 (away, not home) at least, and not 1996?

[jayakris]

I think we know defense, so anything can happen if we play out of our minds against Qatar tomorrow. Here is a good article with some details -

World Cup qualifiers: Sunil Chhetri-led Indian football team hopes to punch above its weight against Asian Champs Qatar

[il_fenomeno]

A loss with 1 goal difference against Qatar at home would be actually a decent result I think. A draw would be really great and a win obviously a fairy tale start for the WCQ campaign.

One hour till kickoff!

[jayakris]

India down 0-1 in the 4th minute, and has held up against a barrage of corners by Qatar till the 35th minute. Totally getting dominated. Udanta has been singularly horrible throughout the match (Manveer is missing today with a strained muscle or something). Others playing okay, but Udanta has made some 7 mistakes so far, by my count. Get him out of there.

0-1 at the half time. Played rather fine in the last 15 minutes, not allowing too many more attacks into our goal and corners. Thapa missed a chance for a score, but that would have needed a perfect strike like Manveer's in the last match.

[jayakris]

Amrinder at the goal has been terrible. Just let somebody score on a boal that he stopped. He was terrible in clearance kicks three times in the first half too. We needed Gurpreet there

0-2 in the 47th minute.

Stimac took out Udanta and put in Mahesh. I guess he was seeing what I was seeing too.

Thapa is replaced by Sahal but he screwed up a great ball into the box from Suresh, and missed the shot wide right. Sahal has looked poor so far. Ok, a great job of winning the ball by him, and a turn and no-look pass into the box but we couldn't do much with it. India playing okay, again. 75th minute.

[jayakris]

Amrinder screws up yet again, with KP Rahul partnering him. 0-3 in the 85th minute.

That Stimac experiment of trying Amrinder at the goal proved disastrous. His mistakes led to three goals, basically. Stimac got a lot of answers today on some of his players, against a quality side.

Apuia has been good though, and Sahal looked fine too.

Update: 0-3 loss in the end.

[Omkara]

Afghan lost 1-8.... Vs that 0-3 is good result...
We should have scored atleast one

[jayakris]

Afghan lost 1-8.... Vs that 0-3 is good result...
We should have scored atleast one

Yeah, this QAT side is good. And I must say they played very well. Really good football with no mistakes at all, and they played more spiritedly than I expected too. A lot of our problems were because they were just playing at their best level.

[Omkara]

Now we need to defeat Afghan side to be no 2. Then hope for best

[arjun2761]

Qatar is a good side mostly in Asia, otherwise they are 61 in the world ranking. Also, Qatari population is less than 500k as most of the population of Qatar are migrants who presumably can’t play for them.

[jayakris]

Qatar is a good side mostly in Asia, otherwise they are 61 in the world ranking. Also, Qatari population is less than 500k as most of the population of Qatar are migrants who presumably can’t play for them.

I am pretty sure migrants are playing in the Qatar team. Most countries seem to have much more relaxed citizenship or residency norms for foreign-born players, compared to India. India really needs to make some adjustments on our laws. We are talking about sports; not about serving in our military or national security agency or anything! Let those with at least a half-parent ancestry to India who would like to play for India, play for us! If we do that, we can have a team that is hopefully inside the top-75 and at least threatening to make the field for a world cup.

We are at #102 with 1201 FIFA points. Went up by +10 points from beating #136 Kuwait, but went down -8 for losing to #61 Qatar. So we stay put at #102 for now. At least we are justifying our ranking these days quite well. We need some +200 points to get to a #60 ranking. That is not easy at all.

There are quite a few young players who are doing well though. I don' think we are going to fall in ranking in the future but we do need 2 or 3 super-talents to emerge, and at least a couple of them need to be scorers.