BLAME IT ON OUR GENES

Football nowadays is more and more physical, and so why to blame it on India's poor infrastructure or lack of youth development for us not being able to climb up the ladder in FIFA World rankings or not performing well at the international stage.

Believe me this is purely through experience as a player and also through following football for a long time now, we (Indian footballers) do not lack in skills or talent, however what does not favour us at the international level is our physical strength and height, we do well against countries from South Asia as the physical capabilities are more or less the same or weaker than Indian players, but go further than those countries we are found wanting in our strength factor.

Physical strength - plays a major factor in a player; it can give you an upper hand in one-on-one situations, aerial balls, speed and moreover confidence over your opponent. But here, we can blame it on our genes that we do not have that natural physique, barring a handful of Indian players will you see have the physique of a international calibre player, compare our current Indian team players height and physique to any international teams except for some Asian teams and we will notice that we are way behind the rest, if we check the history or results of past matches we have played, its only that we have done well against equal or lesser physically built teams and struggled with physically stronger teams. To me I feel that this is a major factor effecting our performances at a higher level and it's a fact which we just can't do anything about it. It's our genes and we will have to live with it.

Now lets compare our infrastructure to some of the African countries, in some places they don't even have proper football grounds, they play on hard sand pitches or streets, but still qualify for the World Cup, We in India may not be having the best of infrastructure or youth development programmes, but still we are doing much more than some of the countries ranked higher than us in FIFA rankings.

The current Team India head coach Bob Houghton has been trying a right path by emphasising on selecting players who are tall and physically well built, if we follow this path and nurture this talent at an early age, it can help us improve our standards at international level, now this does mean I'm against players who are short or less physical, but if we need to raise our standards at the international stage, we need to take these tough decisions.

Franky Barreto is a former Indian international, who is now attached to the University of Wollongong in Dubai as their Sports & Recreation Coordinator