U-17 World Cup: Well hosted, now we need to make plans to play well too

Chandigarh, October 30
Sol Campbell, the former England footballer, says India is possibly 50 to 100 years behind the world’s top football nations.
Praful Patel, the president of the All India Football Federation, says that hosting the U-17 World Cup has given “us an understanding that we can actually build a world-class Indian team with our boys”.
There’s a bit of a gap between these two statements. Who would you believe, the sportsman or the politician? Probably the sportsman, right? With no disrespect to politicians, the fact is that Campbell’s word will carry more weight than a politician’s when it comes to football.
Local-class
Three years of hard work, training and expense didn’t make the Indian team world-class — it’s possibly just Asian-class, and more likely only regional-class.
It must be recorded, however, that the Indian boys played valiantly in their three group stage matches of the World Cup. They lost 0-3 to USA before playing their best match of the tournament, against Colombia, levelling the score at 1-1 before losing 1-2. Then, in their final group game, they were thrashed 4-0 by Ghana.
India could play in this elite 32-team tournament only because they were the hosts; if they had to qualify for it, as the other teams had to, it is just not possible that they would have made it through the tough Asian qualifying matches.
The fact is that the greatest-ever under-17 footballers assembled in India’s history were far from threatening even in the group stages — they could not draw a game, let alone winning one.
Even draws won’t help — to rise, you need to score. India scored once in their three matches — they had packed their squad of 21 with defenders, and there were only two forwards. Clearly, the coach knew that the team doesn’t have a great creative ability to make goals. The aim was to defend stoutly, hit back on the counterattack, and try to avoid total humiliation. Given the talent available to him, coach Luis Norton de Matos chose the right strategy.
There’s a view that this group of players will improve with time and become competitive against at least Asia’s elite in the senior age-group matches.
Let’s be realistic — that’s not going to happen. Past experience has shown that when India’s junior football teams graduate to the senior level, they don’t improve at a significant rate. Their junior counterparts from elite football countries learn much better skills in much lesser time. The gap between them only increases.