Ever since Baichung Bhutia was routed in the presidential elections of All India Football Federation (AIFF) in late 2022, he had kept a discreet silence about the country’s footballing fortunes. However, the former captain and the face of Indian football in pre-Sunil Chhetri days sees little hope in the way the sport is being run in the country at the moment.
The Blue Tigers, as the senior national team is called, failed to register a single win over the past year – barring an inconsequential one over Maldives in a friendly – while the desperate move of coaxing a 40-year-old Chhetri out of retirement for their AFC Asian Cup qualifiers started with a goalless draw against Bangladesh. ‘’Indian football is back to square one,’’ remarked the man once famous as the ‘Sikkimese Sniper.’
Look at what has happened to the federation’s Vision 2047 programme unveiled with so much of fanfare. It promised to reach an end-result of 100 million children playing football but there has been no clear roadmap. What is being followed in the name of grassroots programme in the states is nothing but tokenism.
Kalyan Choubey, a former Indian goalkeeper, had defeated Bhutia 33-1 in the last AIFF election – albeit with the former’s candidature being backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After raising hopes as the first former footballer in the hot seat, Choubey now finds himself ithe eye of the storm with a series of corruption charges being labelled against his regime and the unceremonious manner in which his former Secretary General Shaji Prabhakaran and Media Director Jaydeep Basu were sacked.
The vexed problem of making way for Players of Indian Origin (PIO) play for the country came up once again after Hamza Chowdhury, a defensive midfielder engaged in Premiership, turned out for Bangladesh against India last week.
We have been hearing about Choubey taking the initiative of bringing about a change of rules, but has he spoken to the concerned ministry about it? We need to change the citizenship laws to be able to do it. One needs to do the groundwork before making such claims.
While Bhutia had played the role of a big brother to young Chhetri when he was trying to find his feet in international football, the former was categoric in terming the player’s recall as a retrograde step.
‘’What are we trying to achieve by bringing Sunil out of retirement against opposition like Bangladesh, Hong Kong or Singapore? The introduction of Sunil makes our style of play predictable with attacks being created on the wide and crosses aimed at him for headers,’’ he broke it down.
India’s inability to find a way in the final third and score prompted Manolo Marquez, the Spanish head coach, to convince Chhetri to come out of retirement in view of his form in Indian Super League (ISL).
It looks for short term solution as even if India qualify for the 2027 Asia Cup finals, will Chhetri will be still around then? If you look at the Bangladesh squad, you may have noticed there are players in the age group of 17 and 19 years. That’s the way to go.
The winless streak under Marquez, who took over in mid-2024 after Igor Stimac was sacked – has put him under scanner but Bhutia wants the fans to be patient with him.
‘In the upcoming games, we definitely need to make some tweaks to our style. Instead of just trying to float crosses to Sunil, we should make more use of attacking midfielders like Liston Colaco and ask them to cut in and score. This should address our goalscoring problems a bit.
