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Performances of the senior side
Champions of the Intercontinental Cup 2018 – The Intercontinental Cup took place in Mumbai from the 1st to the 10th Of June, 2018. It was a quadrangle tournament featuring Kenya, New Zealand, Chinese Taipei and the hosts India.
The first game of the tournament saw India taking on Chinese Taipei. India completely dominated the game winning the game by a margin of 5 – 0. Sunil Chhetri scored a hat-trick whereas Udanta Singh and Pranoy Halder scored a goal each.
India’s second game was against Kenya which saw Sunil Chhetri play his 100th international game as he marked the same by scoring two goals. The match was evenly contested in the first game with the scores 0 – 0. The second half saw the Indians score 3 goals with 2 coming from Chhetri and 1 coming from Jeje.
India’s final group game was against New Zealand. New Zealand had quite a few new faces slotted in for the tournament and had earlier lost to Kenya in their first game by 1 – 2. India went ahead with Sunil Chhetri scoring the first goal of the game in the 47th minute. New Zealand soon equalized De Jong in the 49th minute and a late goal from John Dyer sealed the game for the Kiwis as they beat India handing them their first defeat in the tournament by 2 – 1.
India had qualified for the finals after winning their second game against Kenya. Kenya piped New Zealand with a better goal difference to take India on for the coveted Intercontinental Cup 2018. India on the back of their home support started the game off really well scoring 2 goals in the first half which proved to be enough as India won 2-0.
Both the goals came from Sunil Chhetri who ended up as the Highest Goalscorer of the tournament with 8 goals. Chhetri was also awarded the Best Player of the Tournament for his dominant display.
Qualification for the AFC Asia Cup 2019 - India qualified for the AFC Asia Cup 2019 after topping Group A in the third round of the qualifiers. The other teams present in Group A were Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, and Macau. India topped group A with 4 wins out of the 6 matches they played. Their only defeat came against Kyrgyzstan to whom they lost 1 – 2.
They had earlier defeated them 1 – 0. In the earlier group games, India had defeated Macau twice by 2 – 0 and 4 – 1. They won 1 game against Myanmar by 1 – 0 and drew their next game against Myanmar by 2 - 2.
The draw of the AFC Asia Cup 2019 was held at the Burj Khalifa in UAE. India was drawn with the hosts UAE, Bahrain, and Thailand. Out of the three teams, only UAE is ahead of India in terms of rankings on 81 whereas India is ranked 97. Both Bahrain and Thailand are on 116 and 122 respectively. A lot will be expected from the Indian side as they begin their AFC Asia Cup campaign against Thailand on the 6th of January, 2019.
Draw against China - The Indian side surprised one and all when they held the mighty Chinese in the friendly they played against the Giants at Shanghai to a 0 – 0 draw. The match saw the Chinese dominating possession and Gurpreet Singh standing as a wall between them and the Indian goal. The defence stood firm the Chinese attacks and was very well marshalled by the captain Sandesh Jhingan.
The Indians too had good chances which they couldn’t utilize whereas the Chinese led by the experienced Gao Lin hit the Indian crossbar on a number of occasions. This draw surely put out a message that Indians shouldn’t be easily put away in the AFC Asia Cup in 2019.
