Drama revolving around Nehru Cup

Thursday, 13. August 2009 - Subhajyoti Banerjee

As India gets ready to defend their title for the Nehru Cup, the tournament has now reduced to a mere five-team competition. We take a look back...

At first, it was Thailand who expressed their inability to send their senior team and requested the All India Football Federation to include their under-19 team for the tournament. However, the AIFF rejected the idea, and roped in Palestine as the sixth team.

Now there was more twist in the tale - the Palestine Football Association had different ideas, rather than fielding their full strength national squad they decided to field a club team. Quite understandably, the AIFF has dropped the Palestine team from the tournament.

This is an absolute insult to the tournament, which was once regarded as the best football tournament in Asia and ranked 18th in the World.

The Nehru Cup was launched in 1982 with much fanfare. In the 1980s, the Nehru Cup truly lived up to its potential. Football lovers in India got a chance to see quality football from Argentina, Uruguay, Russia (erstwhile USSR), Poland and Hungary.

World Cuppers like Enzo Francescoli (Uruguay, 1982), Jorge Luis Burruchaga (Argentina, 1984), Neri Pompidou (Argentina, 1984), Laszlo Kiss (Hungary, 1984), Rinat Dasayev (Russia) displayed their football skills on India soil.

India, though, most of the time was in the receiving end, but played some exemplary football against tough opponents, against Uruguay in 1983, Argentina in 1984, and Poland in 1988.

Under the tutelage of great Yugoslav coach Milovan Ciric, India perhaps played the best ever football against Argentina in 1984. India was successful in defending the Argentine attack till the 79th minute. 1986 World Cup winning coach, Carlos Bilardo, coached the Argentine team. Apparently, it was the same team that formed the nucleus of the successful World Cup campaign in 1986 with only Diego Maradona missing. The Argentina team at the 1984 Nehru Cup had World Cuppers like Jorge Luis Burruchaga, Neri Pompidou, and Sergio Batista and they beat India 1-0 at the Eden Gardens.

Another unforgettable match was against the mighty Poland in 1988. Amal Dutta's team was dominating the proceedings and was leading by a goal in the first half. Poland somehow managed to level the scores at the later part of second half.

In the 1990s, the Nehru Cup started loosing its sheen as AIFF settled for relatively lesser known teams and it couldn't fall back on the Socialist/Communist block of states. The Nehru Cup was an annual event till 1989, later it became a biennial event due to scarcity of funds. The tournament was shelved after 1997 owing to lack of sponsorship and other matters. The tournament resurfaced in 2007 as the "ONGC" Nehru Cup with the public sector company coming in to fund it.

It was the current national coach Bob Houghton's influence that helped to revive the Nehru Cup in 2007 and India emerged victorious for the first time. However, the revived version had lower ranked teams. Most people had seen this more of a deliberate ploy as to improve our FIFA rankings. Rather than fighting and going down to the high-ranked teams, one would expect India to win against teams similar or lesser in FIFA ranking.

Teams like Thailand (117) and Palestine (177) do not have great FIFA rankings, yet AIFF has failed to plan and make use of the FIFA international calendar.