NEW DELHI: With the All India Football Federation (AIFF) scampering to control the damage following their president Kalyan Chaubey's admission of overlooking the inclusion and entries of the three senior players for the Asian Games, many within the Football House, while alluding to the "immaturity" of their chief official in this regard, are busy fighting off the impression that the president is not on the same page as the rest of his team.
Pointing out that responsibility of picking the national team and deciding its composition always stays with senior coach Igor Stimac, not including senior captain Sunil Chhetri, defender Sandesh Jinghan and goalkeeper Gurpreet Singh Sandhu in the players' list sent to the Asian Games on July 15, rested on a tricky matter of their availability due to the back and forth over the team's participation in Hangzhou.
"We cannot be certain of getting many top players out of their clubs for the Asian Games, simply because the Asian Games is not played in a FIFA window," an official at Football House told TOI, "This may not be an issue with the pre-World Cup qualifiers but with the ISL being played at the same time (as the Asian Games), would the clubs be keen on releasing their main players for two weeks?" "With no clarity (on India's participation) until the last minute, we couldn't include the three senior players in question since their professional calendars too are in place for the coming season," he added.
Expected to begin in the third week of September, rumblings over releasing players have already begun following the green signal for the Asian Games, which will be played between Sept 19-Oct 7. The ball now lies squarely in the ISL's court. On Wednesday too, Stimac, speaking to TOI on the Asian Games and pre-World Cup qualifiers draws, had put the onus on the ISL teams.
"It's really important to quickly finalise the 22-member squad. If the clubs give us an early confirmation (on the release of players), it will be good," he had said.
There is also the issue of the King's Cup in Thailand (Sept 7-10, 2023) just before the Asiad, and the decision was to send an under-23 squad there and take the same to Hangzhou.
"The plan was to select a squad which included players who are not main players in the ISL, but are in need of exposure as well," said a source, "Had we gone in ordinary circumstances no one would have said anything but now with so much attention and government's intervention, it becomes quite difficult to send just an 'exposure' team. Everyone will be watching us closely, especially the ministry. We will have to drop three footballers from the list in the coming days."
"It is not that the president wouldn't know of all this," the source said, "After all, this is a matter of the AIFF not the IOA. Furthermore, this is not the time of former presidents like Priya Ranjan Das Munshi anymore where he could simply direct clubs to release top players and they would obey. Today, with things so much more structured, you cannot go around without thinking about all the stakeholders," he said. With his bosses in the BJP congratulating the team's inclusion, and even the PM tweeting about it, an emboldened Chaubey seems to be claiming this as a huge diplomatic victory secured by himself, hence the grandstanding.
But it is believed that the AIFF top brass had already given up on Indian teams figuring at the Asian Games, as way back as the opening ceremony of the SAFF Championships in Bengaluru on June 21, 2023, since they were far from meeting the government-mandated eligibility criteria.
Yet, public outcry that followed after it was discovered that the football teams could not figure at Hangzhou despite fine victories in the SAFF and Intercontinental Cup, forced a change in perception.
