Had this been late 2023, India’s lucky point against Bangladesh could have been termed as one bad night at work, a match where the team had suffered a collective collapse in form. In 2023, India had gone on a run of three tournament wins at home, looked Iraq in the eye and almost made them blink, were denied by inept refereeing against Malaysia and ended the year with a rare away win in a World Cup qualifier.
Such a consistent upward curve in performance could have absorbed one poor result like the one in Shillong on Tuesday. But since 2023, things have slipped south and how. After beating Kuwait away, it took India 16 months to get a win and then, Bangladesh happened. The inclusion of Hamza Choudhury (more on him later in this issue) has made them better than the sum of their parts, Bangladesh coach Javier Cabrera said, but looking second-best against a team 59 places below in the FIFA rankings shows how India have regressed.
Coach’s plainspeak
Manolo Marquez said as much. “In every training session from when I took charge, I had the feeling that the team was getting better. Today, I felt we took two, three steps back,” he said.
It was how I felt when, after asking the cabin crew to prepare for landing and then circling over Shillong for more than one hour, our flight on Sunday was diverted to Guwahati. Choudhury’s parents were among those making an unscheduled uphill evening road trip, the scenic beauty of most of the journey lost in darkness. At the Guwahati airport, they looked hassled but 24 hours later, Rafia Choudhury and Murshed Dewan were a delight to talk to.
Back to Marquez and apologies for the digression. He and plainspeak have been joined at the hips since he took charge of Hyderabad FC in 2020. After one match in his first year, the Spaniard had said in a flash interview that he would have sacked the coach had he been the owner!
So, it didn’t surprise me when Marquez said what he did to the official broadcasters first and in the ground floor room overflowing with media at Shillong’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. And it was not as if he spared himself from the blame for what was a “very, very poor performance.” It begins with the head coach, he said.
Everyone who could play behind the striker was either injured or returning from injury. It is not Marquez’s fault that Brandon Fernandes, Sahal Abdul Samad and Anirudh Thapa were not around. When you add Anwar Ali, Manvir Singh and Ashish Rai to the ones missing, things get doubly hard. Or trebly, when players selected on ISL form, such as Sunil Chetri and Vishal Kaith, look a shadow of what they were two weeks ago.
Needed: longer camps
Which brings us to that old chestnut: longer preparatory camps. Marquez was being realistic when I asked at the pre-match media conference whether preparations have been adequate, having qualified the question by referring to Bangladesh suspending the league for over a month to get the national team ready. But even when he said that was not feasible with ISL, Marquez left no one in doubt as to how he would love to be in Cabrera’s position.
Even in 2023, India’s success was predicated on Igor Stimac having the players together for nearly one month going into the Intercontinental Cup and the SAFF Championship. If India looked like a well-drilled outfit against Iraq it was because physically, mentally and tactically the players, many of whom were on the pitch on Tuesday, were at their sharpest. Anirudh Thapa’s interview to HT explains why longer camps are necessary.
Lack of time meant a short camp before the matches against Afghanistan and we know what happened. So, a better evaluation of Marquez can be done when India play Hong Kong. With the season over, he has said he plans a longer preparatory camp before that away match in June. All teams on an equal footing also means, in Marquez’s words, a chance to “start afresh.”
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