A milestone in Indian football history unfolded on Tuesday (July 4th) at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium in Bengaluru, as the Blue Tigers emerged victorious in their 9th SAFF Championship out of 14 editions. This marked their second consecutive victory after winning the Intercontinental Cup the previous month, to emerge 100th in the latest FIFA rankings.
Gurpreet Singh Sandhu the exceptional goal keeper again emerged as the saviour for India in the SAFF Championship. Team India’s captain and top scorer in the tournament Sunil Chhetri revealed that India wouldn’t have emerged victorious if not for the crowd support. And let me tell you a small secret, the games against Lebanon and Kuwait weren’t easy and if you weren’t there, we wouldn’t have got this..
Throughout this year, right from when we played at Manipur to Odisha and now Bangalore, the whole nation, everywhere we went it has been special.”
-An important confession in the context of India. Do we as Indians give as much importance to other games besides Cricket, both public and sports bodies???? Sports and sportsmen are like individuals. Support them, encourage them, reward them, and stand up to applaud and you raise their level of performance.
We are 1.4 Billion people with more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. What’s stopping us from reaching the top 5 world standards in other sports also?
Kapil Dev’s men in 1983 took India by storm and inspired the glory achieved in Cricket today. The responsibility of doing the same in Hockey, Football and other sports lies on all of us!!!!!!!
Till then a Billion Cheers for our Footballers for a no mean Achievement. !!!!!!!
(South Asian Football Federation-(SAFF) is an association of the football playing nations in South Asia which is the regional subsidiary of the larger Asian Football Confederation, incorporated in 1997. The members of the association are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.)
