Indian football team faces crucial nine months

With the SAFF Championship beginning today, the Indian team embarks on a journey of building peak form in time for AFC Asia Cup

- Deepti Patwardhan

The best 45 minutes from India in the last five decades." This is how the national football coach Igor Stimac described India's second half performance at the 2023 Intercontinental Cup final against Lebanon on Sunday. As far as bold claims go, Stimac may have found his Mount Everest. Maybe it was the recency bias or a coach getting carried away with his team's performance. But while it is debatable if India indeed played the best 45 minutes of football in the last 50 years, Stimac's team certainly brought the energy and entertainment in the second half to beat Lebanon 2-0 and regain the title.

The triumph will see India break back into the top-100, and replace Lebanon at No. 99 when the new FIFA rankings are released. Since the start of 2022, India have been unbeaten and have kept clean sheets in eight out of the nine matches they played. Given the quality of the opposition-India mainly played teams on par or ranked lower-none of these are big gains in itself, but they are encouraging steps for a country that has struggled to get a foothold in the global sport. The riches from the Indian Super League (ISL), established in 2014, haven't quite translated to success on the international level for the Blue Tigers', whose highest FIFA ranking of 94 was achieved back in 1996.

"I know we can do better," Stimac, who has been in charge of the Indian men's team since 2019, said on Sunday. "As a coach, I cannot show satisfaction. It's still a long way to go. We are using each second of time on certain improvements."

The four-nation tournament was the start of a busy schedule for Indian football that will culminate next year, over the months of January and February, at the AFC Asian Cup, the most prestigious continental event. Even before they have time to unpack the experience from the Intercontinental Cup, India will be at Bengaluru for the SAFF (South Asian Football Federation) Championship, which begins today.