EXCLUSIVE
Following in the footsteps of Kalyan Chaubey, the All India Football Federation (AIFF) president, Shaji Prabhakaran, the secretary general, too has weighed in on sending the best team to the Asian Games. Speaking exclusively to RevSportz, Prabhakaran said, “The Asian Games is a huge emotional connect for us in India. And for Indian football, it is a very important tournament, perhaps more important because of the history associated with it.”
Prabhakaran went on to suggest that some of India’s best moments in football had come at the Asian Games, and we needed to take that into account when deciding on the team that will participate in Hangzhou. “It is not just any Games,” he said. “If you go back in time, you will see our best-ever performance in football was at the 1962 Asian Games in Jakarta. There is a long history associated with it and we need to stay true to that. In the national interest, the (AIFF) president will speak to every ISL club to defer the start of the league by a period so that we can have our best players in China.”
A good Asian Games performance, Prabhakaran reckoned, would have a spiralling effect on Indian football. “It can’t be seen in isolation,” he argued. “People in India watch multi-discipline games, and there is huge interest in the Asian Games. If you follow social media you will know what I mean. A good performance at the Asian Games will surely feed off into the ISL and other competitions. Our football now has momentum. Fans are upbeat and following the sport. Players have renewed self-belief and the ground is fertile for growth. The Asian Games performance can help a lot.”
It now remains to be seen if the ISL Clubs agree with the AIFF top management and push back the start of the ISL by 10 days to allow Igor Stimac to field the best Indian team in China.
RevSportz Editorial Note
Prabhakaran is not wrong about the emotional connect, but we live in very different times. The Indian team that won gold in Jakarta in 1962 contained the greatest players to wear the national jersey – Chuni Goswami, Tulsidas Balaram, PK Banerjee, Peter Thangaraj and Jarnail Singh, to name just a few – and the event was very much the centre piece of continental competition. These days, the Asian Games, like the Olympics, is a competition for Under-23 players, with only three established stars permitted. As Igor Stimac, the national coach, has said in an interview with RevSportz in August, the much-greater priority is a strong performance in the World Cup qualifiers and the Asian Cup in Qatar in January. The opposition will be far stronger in both cases, and it will be the litmus test of India’s progress. Just how much time Stimac is given with the team for those vital matches will tell us just how invested the stakeholders are in the national team.
Read: “I Want the Boys to Play like Blue Tigers”: Igor Stimac