Re: Indian Football
Have u guys been watching the Santosh Trophy matches on Zee Sports lately...??
It outlines all that is wrong with Indian Football today... Even with the media support, excellent coverage etc., there seems to be something amiss...
That something is the indian strategy, or the lack of it...
I know dribbling the ball is a dying art, but still its the fundamental skill required especially for midfileders and forwards... And apparently the state coaches do not consider this to be important... I know football is a team game, and passing the ball around is the better way to get the ball forward, but if u don't have quality converters up front then what is the point... The only goals that are scored here are mostly off set pieces or resulting from mad scrambles in front of goal, where some lucky bugger manages to get a solid toe on the ball... The beauty of the game is lost.. true beauty is in dribbling... remember Johan Cryuff, remember Diego Maradona.. It is thru solo efforts that stars are established...
Here what i saw was, instead of a forwarded dribbling inside the box, and being felled by a defender, things were opposite... Instead of faking, fienting, the forwards chose shoulder pushes of make room, or in some cases, blatant shoves, for which the forward was given benefit due to being on attack... I mean, whatever happened to good old dribbling, holding the ball, waiting for support, wall passes ...?? These are what make football the No.1 spectator sport in the world.
Another thing i noticed, was the rigidity in formation... The funda for them is, if coach says 4-3-3 then it 4-3-3 throughout, there's isn't any flexibility, no adapting to the flow of play, or switching positions when a teammate goes forward...
Its like they're in a Foosball table or something...
Coming to the recent 3-0 loss to Japan, this particular game put to rest the theorum that players from the subcontinent are not "appropriately built" for the game of football... Look at those pint sized Japanese players, they have adapted their game according to their capabilities... And of course, they dribble. Juggles, stepovers, cryuff turns, fakes... they have it all in their repertoire.
If they are capable fo qualifying for the greatest stage in world football consistently, then there is no excuse for indian football to lag behind.
When i saw the India vs Yemen debacle at Ambedkar stadium last month, i was even more surprised... We were clearly the better team on paper, and anyone who saw the line-ups would probably have felt that this would be an easy one... which is was... for the Yemenis. When the final scoreline read 3-0, i knew it would only be downwards from here for the indian, and so it was...
Now i know Bob Houghton isn't gonna read this, but what the heck... How can they expect the country to support, or even show interest in the game, if all they can offer is a drab, mechanical version of the game the world describes as "beautiful".
Sorry about the long rant.
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