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Yes, heart-breaking loss after leading till 83rd minute ...
Next, another tough match, as we travel to 2022 World Cup hosts Qatar for the qualifiers on Tuesday.

India is about to play Qatar in Doha now. This will be a very difficult match, as Qatar has been playing as the best team in Asia lately. And we are without Sunil Chhetri. The 22 year old Kerala kid Sahal Samad is in the team with Manveer Singh, to try to score. Jeje also has been missing for a while, so we are in a world of trouble, away in Qatar. Let us hope for the best.

0-0 in the 23rd minute. And Gurpreet takes too much time for a goal kick after a great save, and gets a yellow. That is stupid.

5 corners for Qatar by the 25th minute.... Under attack. Still 0-0 though.

0-0 at half-time. Qatar has had 11 shots at our end, but no score. Can we keep this going? Doubtful. At some point they will score. That is how football works.

Indian goal keeper is really good. In this match as well as in the last one he has made many good saves.

60th minute.... still 0-0. I have to run to a meeting. Please put in an update, saniaFan...

It seems chhetri is not playing. Don't know why. India is mostly defending but for last 15 mins I have not seen much threatening moves from Qatar. After 70 mins it is still 0-0
Still 0-0 after 75mins ... one more good save by Gurpreet
Still 0-0 at 85 min mark but India extremely lucky as a Qatari shot hit the post!!
Still 0-0 at 88 min mark one good thing is that India is not kicking aimlessly. They are trying to construct moves and that makes sure that it is not constant pressure at the Indian end.
At 90mins still 0-0 ... 4 mins of extra time.

And 0-0 it finally is!!!!!!!!!!

Finally a match where we were able to defend till the end!!!
To get a draw against the Asian champion in their den is really a great result!!!

Nice result for India! 44% ball possession by India isn't bad overall and probably helped salvage the draw although the offensive stats are heavily skewed in favor of Qatar which means that lot of our possession was in defense and midfield.

BTW, in a friendly today, Oman beat #87 Lebanon 1-0 today despite being a man down for the last third of the game, so our performance against Oman was also not that bad considering that we were 1-0 up on them till the 83rd minute.

Terrific!!!! Great job to get draw in an away match against a red hot team!!! And finally the defense held up under the new coach. This should be a big confidence booster, and will help the team trust the coach better too. Congrats India!!

Tight loss against Oman and a draw in Qatar are terrific performances for Indian football.

We are definitely punching as a middleweight Asian team now.

Amazing draw against the current asian champions!!!!!! India is the only asian country this year to keep a clean sheet against Qatar this year.

depleter wrote: ↑Wed Sep 11, 2019 5:28 amAmazing draw against the current asian champions!!!!!! India is the only asian country this year to keep a clean sheet against Qatar this year.

Amazing indeed. If only we could hold on for a few minutes at the end of that Oman game... Oh well.

India slips to 104th spot in latest FIFA ranking.

jaydeep wrote: ↑Thu Sep 19, 2019 4:57 pmIndia slips to 104th spot in latest FIFA ranking.

But it is looking more and more like a fair ranking. When we moved up a while ago from 160 to 96, it looked like we were over-ranked. But now we have had enough results to justify our rankings. We are at least a top-110 team, which was like a dream even 3-4 years ago.

Yes agree, this looks a fair ranking considering our recent results ... We are showing improvements and consistency in our results.

I like it that we are beginnning to think big in football, but this may be a bit too big...

India likely to play World Cup finalists Croatia in a friendly

It seems Stimac wants to play this a few days before our big qualifying match against at home Qatar on March 26th, 2020.

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