Suraj wrote:Rahul M: I think I speak for a bunch of folks when I say this, but I don't know what the AFC Challenge Cup is, and why it is important. Or for that matter, what the qualification in the Asian championship is about. Why not describe what these events are and how our performance has changed ?
Boss, let me try to put down in as brief as possible the case of Indian football. What this win means? Where we should be? Where we are etc? Its all my personal opinion, so take it for what its worth.
Indian football had been at its very best in the early 50s to mid 60s. Wiki says, we qualified by default for the 50 World cup because all of our opponents in the qual stage failed to show up, however, we did nt play in the world cup cos many of our folks did nt prefer wearing shoes. We took part in the 1956 Melbourne olympics which was also marred by a large no of boycotts. We ended up losing the bronze medal playoff against Hungary. This olympics is remembered for the hat-trick by Neville Dsouza {from Goa} against Ozland. Overall, our best show in the world scene so far. We were the top dog team and the team to beat on the Asian stage in the early 50s and mid 60s. We won the 51 Asiad at Delhi, the 62 one in Jakarta, finished 3rd in 70 Bangkok, reached the semis in 58 and so on. Overall, a stage of at least Asian domination. This was also the time when names like MA Salim, Chuni Goswami, PK Banerjee, Neville Dsouza, Sailendranath Manna, Syed Nayeemuddin etc dominated the Indian scene.
Come the 70s, the mid-east started floating in oil cash from the mid 70s crisis period. That period also saw dramatic changes in the way football was being played, just as in hockey. {Remember our "best" hockey triumph on the world scene is the 75 KL world championship win.} The game became more running oriented, just as in hockey. Set-pieces started dominating the scene. Scientific coaching became the rule. Man-marking started happening, replays etc came into prominence. Flair started becoming restricted to the Brazilians and a few other select teams. And the days of Puskas and the beautiful game was long gone. 1966 marked the entry of England on the world scene with a come-from-behind win in the finals against W. Germany. In particular, Geoff Hurst {the overtime double goal scorer for England} + W. German team symbolized the new power phenomenon that modern football became a rendition of. In the Indian context, that period also saw more interest in cricket with the domination of the Indian spin maestros. Overall, a bad time to be a hockey or a football player {or a fan or babu or whatever}. The game started becoming centered in pockets like Kerala, Bengal {both east as well as the west, where it had always been the hoi polloi game}, Goa and a few other vestiges. Its interesting that the communist movement saw football as the game of the masses, so it had some official blessings too. More to the point was that Bengal players had dominated the scene {the national team + no 11 position} for a long time.
We started getting to be the star team only in South Asia around the late 80s and mid 90s. The rot had truly set in. Even though there were a few star players once a while like IM Vijayan, Jo Paul Ancheri, Bruno Coutinho etc, there was no mass pull in terms of star power till the arrival of Baichung Bhutia and of late, Sunil Chhetri and NP Pradeep. The team had to witness playing in stadia with hardly any fans, even in Indian locales. The exception seems to be the Ambedkar stadium in Dilli or probably stadia in Goa, Kerala and Bengal. Everything else seems to suck even with free tikkits offered for fans. And these days, it is not even clear that we can win the south asian championship with considerable panache, if we do, or at all. {We, in fact, lost the recently held one in the finals to Maldives (in Sri Lanka, which has been a pit for Indian football).}
What this AFC challenge cup win means is a freedom to get started again on the Asian scene. The winner of this tournament gets an automatic entry to the Asian cup, which is the premier championship in Asia {like Euro xxxx}. We overcame a major straitjacket and got out of this vicious circle of playing the lower ranked teams, losing to them again and again, and sticking around in the bottom of the fifa ranking pits. We should be able to climb up the rankings chart a bit better with access possible to higher ranked teams {in some part}. We also dont need to worry about qualifying for the qualifying competitions, if you know what I mean. Thats been our bane. Some lowly ranked mid-east team {like Lebanon or Yemen} comes from nowhere and thumbs at our nose and gets off and loses in the next round or 2. So we have been sorely lacking the luck factor in the recent past. To keep things in context, our last major win was the Nehru cup win in 2007 {against Syria 1-0}, again at the Ambedkar stadium. Before that we won the LG cup in Vietnam in 2002. Its been a long drought....
The catch with this win is that the Asian cup is in 2011. And most folks like Baichung etc are almost too old. So it is not clear what fraction of this team will stick around till 2011. Injuries too. But its a good start. We will get below 150 fifa ranking if I am not wrong. That is a good start cos if we have to get to be < 50, we need to start somewhere. 155 does nt sound too enticing, and we are not going to climb in 10s and 20s anymore. We have to go one step at a time. If the Indian team gets ranked around 50 in 2012 or so, that will be a miracle. For that, the young ones need to be identified early and channeled in a pyramidal architecture to the national team. Easily said than done given that AIFF has been our nemesis in letting us sink so low for so long. The heydays of 50s and 60s football {and hockey} was let go waste by the IHF and AIFF. They did nt adapt to the changes happening in the Oiropean game. Playing on grass in both hockey and football became passe a long time back. Anyway..
Here is one article on the history of Indian football
http://www.goal.com/en-us/Articolo.aspx ... oId=572076
. Well skewed up. Two young guns playing their 3rd match against two old ones playing their second. What a comedy of errors. 
. 
.