Not yet there, but the gap is closing for Indian football
GUWAHATI: As the floodlights over the Indira Gandhi Athletics Stadium in Guwahati dimmed and the final few fans trooped out of the arena, now clothed in the darkness of despair, isolated chants of ‘India, India’ could still be heard. At least some of them remembered more than the last ten minutes.
India’s opening 2022 World Cup qualifier may have produced the exact same result as their opening 2018 World Cup qualifier — 1-2 at home to Oman. But neither could the matches have been more different nor the respective aftertastes that they left. Disappointment was a common theme but they were of different flavours. Four years ago, it was of the hopeless, exasperating kind — you knew after the game that the gulf was too big. It was the kind of disappointment that you could lighten with self-deprecating humour. Oman suck, they only managed to score two!
But perhaps the disappointment that pervaded Guwahati on Thursday is a sign of the progress Indian football has made over four years. No joke can take away the pain of losing a game that was being won with ten minutes left. Where once there was no hope, there was now hope till the very end.
When the disappointment eventually fades, a bunch of positives still remain. For thirty minutes, India were statistically better than Oman, a team that only lost by a solitary goal to Japan in the recent Asian Cup. Expected Goals (XG) is a metric used by sports analytics companies like OPTA to predict how many goals a team is likely to score. For more than thirty minutes, India dominated Oman in this metric (as per stats from Grey Area Analytics). Then, as India drew back to defend their precious lead, their rivals piled on the attacks and pulled away. Even after that, till the Oman equaliser came, India frustrated their rivals with the kind of discipline that was never a hallmark of their game under previous coaches.
On a luckier day, India could have killed the game in those 30-odd minutes, a point that Igor Stimac dwelt on in his post-match evaluation. “We could have scored many goals in the first half and killed the game then, and there,” said Stimac. “My players are fitter than the Oman players, but they are more experienced. A time will come when we are not going to lose games like this and put the game to bed early. But for that, we need to continue working hard, and be patient.”
Maybe experience will solve a lot of these issues. After all, Ashique Kuruniyan and Lallianzuala Chhangte are 22, Udanta Singh 23 while Anirudh Thapa at 21 is the heartbeat of India’s midfield. They will be at their respective peaks when the 2023 Asian Cup comes around, provided they grab a ticket to China. Maybe then, they will be able to go toe to toe with a top-ten Asian team for ninety minutes. For them to get there, there will be many more harsh lessons along the way. Starting with Asian champions Qatar next week.