Indian football at the crossroads

India came into the AFC Asian Cup Qatar 2011™ having not appeared at the finals of the continental championship since 1984. But while the 2008 AFC Challenge Cup winners have lost their opening two games at this year’s tournament – against Australia and Bahrain - coach Bob Houghton (pictured) is confident the football landscape within the nation is set to change.“I think there is a determination now in the country, from the AFC, from FIFA that Indian football needs to move on,” the Englishman told www.afcasiancup.com. “I don’t think people will throw their hands in the air and give up. I think people will do the opposite and people will sit down and focus on what is fundamentally wrong with the game in India and how do we change it. “And it’s not a difficult question to answer because you are talking about a country that has zero football infrastructure. We have, I think, one stadium in the whole of the country that meets the criteria to host a World Cup qualifier and that’s in Chennai, where there is no football and it’s an athletics stadium. “We have no training facilities – and I mean that – which is why when we get the national team together we have to go outside the country to find somewhere to train. If you have no infrastructure then it’s almost impossible to organise a league because there are no grounds to play the matches. “Our matches kick off at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and are played on surfaces that no self-respecting top player would play on and in 35 degrees of heat at least. Therefore, the games are very slow tempo and maybe players are running three or four kilometres compared with the 10 or 11 you’ve got to do when you come to an Asian Cup. “I genuinely believe that being in the Asian Cup will move everything on.”Houghton’s is one of numerous voices that have called for an improvement in the situation within the game in India, including the President of the Asian Football Confederation, Mohamed Bin Hammam.Bin Hammam visited the Indian delegation at their hotel during the group stages of the AFC Asian Cup and has been pushing the football authorities and government officials to step up their work to improve the state of the game in India.“The President of the AFC came to India three years ago and said India is a hundred years behind and then he came last year and said nothing has changed,” says Houghton. “I don’t know how long or how many times people have got to say that to get the authorities to come to grips with it but it’s not being done.“The first step has got to be infrastructure. The fact we haven’t got any good development programmes or coach education programmes can be changed, you can force clubs to start working with under 19s, under 17s and under 14s. That just needs the political will to start it. “But you can’t build infrastructure overnight, it takes a definite commitment. We have had some serious talks about it while we have been in Doha but unless they move on, the game won’t move forward.”Houghton’s previous work in China often leads to comparisons being made between the state of football in the two countries given the similar levels of economic growth within the two burgeoning powers. But the 62-year-old stresses any such thoughts are thoughts are irrelevant.“There’s no comparison,” he says. “In China, if you go back 10 years, they were in great shape. They had a wonderful group of players in the late 1990s, qualified for the World Cup in 2002, had a very good league in place, super stadia with everybody building their own training facilities.“And then they committed suicide by getting involved in bribery and corruption and match fixing and of course that kills any sport immediately because no one believes what they’re watching when they go to the stadiums. China has got that horrible circumstance where they have got top players and top leaders going to jail. “Even at grassroots level, the comparison can’t be made. China is a light year ahead of India. “People consistently make the economic comparisons because there has been double-digit growth in both countries for several years but if you’re in China you can believe it because you can see the infrastructure that is evidence of that. “But in India, in football terms, there has been absolutely no result of economic growth, no stadiums built or any infrastructure in the sport. There can be no comparison. “Everyone compares it because of the similarities in the populations but that’s not the issue, it is the quality of the development work being done in the countries. “So Denmark can qualify for the World Cup with three million people, Saudi can qualify for four straight World Cups but that’s not the issue. The issue is what you are doing with the players you have got.”