You know what it feels like when your team hits a goal? You remember, don’t you? That sweet fizz in the air as the ball flies past the goalkeeper, the even sweeter thwack of it hitting the back of the net. The yells of anger and despair from the opposition, the cries of joy and relief from the scorer, the team… from you.
You remember that don’t you?
If your answer is yes, you’re probably not a fan of the Indian national men’s football team.
It’s now been 532 minutes (including stoppage time) since India last scored a goal in international football (Manvir Singh, vs Kuwait, 75′). That’s nearly nine hours of goalless football spread across four months. What’s made it feel even longer still is that you got the sense India could have played for a further 532 minutes across those five (and a bit) matches, and they would not have come close to changing that stat line.
For a fan, there are few worse feelings. For a neutral observer, there are few more boring sights.
Late on Thursday night (10 PM local, 12.30 AM IST), this had all been supposed to change. Up against an Afghanistan team missing a vast majority of their best players, India were going to take charge and smash aside all the concerns, and worries, and goalless despair that had been slowly building up. Head coach Igor Stimac put out a statement of intent with his starting XI: essentially a 4-4-2 that morphed into a 4-2-4, with two attack-minded, passing midfielders in the two.
On paper, that formation, those personnel, had ‘attack, attack, attack’ written all over it. This was Stimac looking to back the pre-match talk with a proper in-game strut.
On the field, though, it was a grim mess. India had one shot on target, and that was a long-range pop. Tasked with dictating the play against an underdog side, they did nothing of the sort. The game ended 0-0, and few could argue that wasn’t a fair result.
There were flashes, as there always seem to be: in-form Vikram Pratap Singh, had a decent headed chance and made some neat runs in between the centre-backs. Manvir Singh, all flailing limbs and non-stop running had a miscued shot after a superb run to meet a lovely cross from Lallianzuala Chhangte. Late on, Subhasish Bose headed off-target from a pin-point Brandon Fernandes corner. Those made for three legitimate chances to score, but they felt like isolated points that came from nowhere… the creativity still coming out only in the flashes.
It’s these glimpses of potential that added to the frustration, hurriedly swept aside as they were by the large swathes mediocrity that overwhelmed it all.
A lot of the issues are understandable — Vikram, on India debut, was nervous and snatched at the ball. Sunil Chhetri simply didn’t get enough of it, but seemed a bit slower to react too, a bit late in filling in the gaps that he used to so effortlessly. Jeakson Singh, still not a starter at club Kerala Blasters after a long injury layoff, looked rusty and tentative.
Jeakson, though, was emblematic of the problem with Stimac’s 4-4-2/4-2-4 hybrid. Loading your side with attacking players is great, but whether they tick or not depends hugely on how much supply they get — and that’s asking a lot from the two in the middle. If one those is off his game… invariably you end up with a result, and a performance, like this.
The subs didn’t change the situation much either, like-for-like as they were. Purely from an attacking perspective, Liston Colaco on the right was wasted, as was Brandon Fernandes in the second striker role — with the left wing crying out for a more direct runner, and the middle of the field a player who could set the tempo, it jarred even more. Mahesh Singh’s crossing from the left, meanwhile, was nullified by the fact that India had virtually no aerial threat in the box in open play at that point.
The crux of the issue is that against palpably inferior opposition, India struggled to create more than the occasional chance and did not manage one proper spell of sustained pressure. And that’s a worrying trend that we have seen repeatedly across Stimac’s term. After the match, the head coach said the match was “interesting”, that his team had created several good chances… but the fact remains that, keeping his outward optimism (also understandable) aside, they really weren’t good enough to take home anything more than the one point. He probably knows it too.
That point, though, keeps them above Kuwait — who lost 0-3 to an Akram Afif inspired Qatar on the same night — but it’s just gotten tighter in the race for second spot, and a chance to play in the third round of the FIFA World Cup qualifiers. Beat Afghanistan (26 March) and Kuwait (6 June) at home and they should still be in control of their own destiny but to get three points (let alone six), they have to do something they seem to have forgotten how to do… score a goal.
It remains to be seen if they can remember how to do it, and help their fans remember what it feels like, in four days’ time.
