The Indian national football team’s horror run culminated into a 0-1 loss against Hong Kong, a team ranked 26 ranks below it. But what has gone wrong? Our correspondents Aashin Prasad (AP) and Neeladri Bhattacharjee (NB) delve into numbers to analyse the problems of Manolo Marquez’s men.
Transcript:
NB: Hello and welcome to Sportstar’s coverage of Indian football and the scene is not looking that great at the moment. India has lost to lower-ranked Hong Kong and there have been a lot of discussions about the future of the manager. There have been discussions about the people in power in the All India Football Federation (AIFF) and I have with me my colleague Aashin Prasad. We‘ll be discussing what is going wrong with the men’s national team at the moment, especially at a time when the its chances of qualifying for the AFC Asian Cup look practically very bleak. So Aashin, we‘d like to start with what do you think has gone wrong in Manolo’s spell so far, especially because he has failed to win any competitive match for that matter, and the only win was a friendly against Maldives.
AP: Yeah, this has been the case with Indian football for quite some time. We haven’t had many pleasant topics to discuss when it comes to the national team. There was a lot of optimism which came with Manolo when he joined the national team, with the caveat of him being in a dual role with FC Goa in the Indian Super League. But in terms of the results, it’s been pretty poor. Performances have been up and down. I thought against Hong Kong, that was one of their better displays. They did have some chances to put Hong Kong away and Hong Kong was not great as well. Despite being the home team, I think they were the poorer team that that day. But unfortunately for us, an error from Vishal Kaith undid all the work. The persisting issue with the forwards not being able to score goals consistently came to be an issue again on that night. Ashique Kuruniyan had a terrific chance to put away and a professional footballer not being able to use his weaker foot is inexcusable in that situation. Liston Colaco also had a good chance in the second-half. I think as a game, you can’t put it squarely on the coach. The coach has had mixed results, but the game against Hong Kong should have been a better display from the players which I feel like they didn’t do. Yeah. In terms of Manolo, you could see that the defensive numbers have slightly been better, but in terms of the attacking output, it’s not been great. He started his tenure with Sunil Chhetri and then called on him to come back and that also hasn’t given him the best results. But yeah, all in all, it doesn’t look good for Manolo himself now.
NB: I feel that Manolo was given a squad which lacked a number of important players. Ashique came in much later on, back from his injury and was not a regular starter for Mohun Bagan. I think there was a lack of planning from the Marquez camp about which players to select and who to play. If a player is playing as a full-back for most of the season after coming back from injury, you cannot play him as a central forward in a competitive AFC Asian Cup qualifier. Experimenting those things against Maldives would have been a better idea where he played sort of a wider role. If we look at Stephen Constantine, who started with a rather defensive minded approach, he was gifted with a lot of technically gifted players. Anirudh Thapa is an example. He has not been in the scheme of things for Marquez at all. Thapa’s impact we saw in Chennaiyin FC. We saw Brandon Fernandes come in and be a rather inconsistent player. He has been one of India’s best players in the last couple of years but I think injuries has spoiled his game time a little.
AP: Yeah, most of these players, in the attack, has been very inconsistent. Thapa, the form which he showed in Chennaiyin, he’s not been able to show that consistently for Mohun Bagan. He’s been playing in a star-studded team where his playing time has been limited. I feel like he’s being played out of position in Bagan and lack of form and game time has cost him his place. We haven’t seen much of him under Manolo, same goes for Sahal Abdul Samad. It’s not just a case with Brandon, it’s been a case with like most of the attacking players in the Indian team.
NB: A couple of off-the-field factors also come into the fray when we are talking about a clear conflict of interest when you have the coach of the national team and a top flight club managing you. If any player is picked from that club, the players at the back of the mind are bound to think about whether a bias is coming into play. And I think that also would have created a sort of rift within the dressing room and especially when the morale is this low.
AP: Do you feel there was a case of the coach going for the players he was familiar with?
NB: I think there were some some cases. In the India vs Bangladesh game where I think Suresh Singh would have done a much better job in a position where Ayush Chhetri played. I think Ayush has been really good in the Indian Super League but Suresh at the international level has been much better. Udanta Singh coming back and not making the mark that he used to, both players coming from FC Goa. Those are questions which players would keep asking among themselves, especially at a time when you have other players, wingers like PV Vishnu playing really well for East Bengal and not getting a chance. In Bengaluru FC, Vinith Venkatesh is there.
AP: Manolo came in at a very tricky time where he couldn’t get out of the FC Goa job but he wanted to coach the national team also. With the short time which he has for training, he would also want to get the players who he thinks can execute his ideas better so that way I can understand why one would do that. We don’t know whether there were dressing room issues. Now, there is an opportunity for him to get rid of all the bias, which people think he might have, but do you think he will be the coach going forward?
NB: I think it’s very unlikely for Manolo to go ahead. He’s one of the most frank managers that you can talk to. He’s like Simon Grayson from Bengaluru FC, who doesn’t mince his words. He just comes up and tells you what is correct and what is not.
AP: Stimac was also like that.
NB: Yes, but Stimac was less of a defeatist after matches. He complained a little more, but Marquez concedes defeat a little easily after the press conferences. When you look at his press conferences, he is like ‘Yeah, we were wrong, we played bad’ and Stimac would be ‘This is where we were wrong’. This is the clear difference. When you have those kind of defeatist answers, I think they also don’t help the cause of the national team players who are struggling. At the same time, it’s poor of us to put the entire blame on Manolo. The players have to share a lot of blame because many from this lot have been playing for five-six years and they are one of the most highly paid players in the Indian Super League. We see them moving to clubs with more lucrative contracts and settling for mediocre football and that mediocrity, I think, is consuming Indian football eventually.
AP: I think the FC Goa CEO also brought up this issue that the clubs do feel like they have to take some responsibility in having inflated these wages, but do you feel like the players have taken their position in the ecosystem for granted? There were reports that the federation would have paid them handsomely to beat Hong Kong. We have had better results in Indian history but then I don’t think it needed this lucrative push for them to get the job done, especially at a time when being a footballer in India is not in a bad state. You do get paid handsomely.
NB: I think the offer which AIFF came up with was outright poor. Hong Kong is a team against which India took 54 seconds to open the scoring the last time they met. If you see that match and this, you will just feel plain sad by the kind of temperament change that has happened. Instead of providing incentive, the AIFF could have arranged an exposure trip maybe to South Korea, Europe, or inside Asia. Players are also too settled into the job. The other day I was talking to someone in the Indian football ecosystem and they were talking about a player earning around 25 crores in a 4 1/2 year contract. When those kind of wages come into your account, you have to think about whether you want to settle in with a great future or take a pay cut and play in the second division of Korea or England or somewhere around Asia, something that these footballers don’t want to do. But what do you think some changes can be done to remedy this situation?
AP: If you have to look at immediate changes structurally within the ISL, we need to try and get some of these forwards more playing time in the striking position. From the coaching point of view, I would still want to stick with Manolo because now that he is free of his duties at FC Goa, I would like to give him some more time purely because I could see some changes within the playing style which I have liked compared to what I’ve seen previously with the Stimac.
NB: I’ll also like to see Manolo keep working with the national team because hardly a year is not genuinely a metric to look at what a manager can provide. I would like to see if Manolo is given the freedom to bring in more youngsters into the squad, because he has the history of nurturing youngsters to become formidable players.
So with that we come to the end of our talk. We’ll be bringing you all the updates that are happening in the ecosystem of Indian football as and when they happen. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll be back with another discussion very soon.
Content Source: sportstar.thehindu.com