India has played in the World Cup and is a Cricket World Cup winner and was also a Hockey World Champion! Well, now let’s get serious and talk about why India didn’t make it to the football world cup.
India actually won a ticket to the World Cup in 1950, but the fact that Indians were playing barefoot at the time, which had long been banned by FIFA, and the lack of foreign exchange at the time, as well as the need to travel across the ocean by boat to Brazil, caused the Indian team to forego qualifying for the 1950 World Cup, which was not considered to be more important than the Olympics by the Indian Football Federation (IFF) at the time. But Indian football at that time was indeed quite strong, in 1951, the Asian Games in New Delhi had defeated Iran 1-0 to win the men’s football championship – the home game is not honourable?In 1962, India in Jakarta 2-1 to beat South Korea to win the Asian Games Championship.1956, India also in the Olympic Games in the final four, was the first team to India was the first Asian team to reach such heights.
The Indian Football Association (IFA) is far more open than the Chinese Football Association (CFA), which hired a foreign head coach in 1963 and has so far hired 10 diplomats, including Horton, who has been the head coach of the Chinese national team, and who has been in charge of the Indian team for five years (2006-2011), the longest time in charge of the longest diplomacy, which has not led to a breakthrough in Indian football.
The Indian Football Federation (IFF) has set a target of reaching the final stage of the World Cup in 2022. The goal of the Indian League, is to surpass the Chinese Super League – in 2014, Anelka had joined FC Mumbai City, Piero joined Delhi Dynamo, Pire, Trezeguet and Yong Berry and other stars have also played in the Indian Premier League, the former Manchester United striker Berbatov also signed for the Indian Premier League team, the Kerala Blasters, in the summer of this year. But overall, the Indian league is still at a very junior level, and Indians also prefer cricket to football, so the Indian league can’t attract the interest of sponsors.
The British colonised India for so many years and took the world’s favourite football with them on their way out, probably because they didn’t think the sport was suitable for India either. Maybe Indians are too timid to play ball games without a stick to back them up ……
Indian football team at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil
The Legend of the Barefoot
In an era when India was fighting for its freedom and boycotting British-made goods, Indian players playing barefoot would certainly make Indian nationalism even higher if they could beat the British on the pitch, so most Indian players kept the habit of playing barefoot. Although Indian players were not used to wearing sneakers until 1952, they had to wear them on the field when it rained to minimise falls.
The Indian team, which experimented with independence only in 1947 and participated in the 1948 London Olympics as an absolute new force in international football, was beaten 2-1 by France in the first round of the tournament, but eight of the eleven players on the pitch were playing without shoes. As the British Empire proper, India won the hearts and minds of the English crowd with their excellent performance and have a bright future ahead of them.
A tournament of chaos
The world is struggling to recover after the ravages of the Second World War, the worst in human history. A shattered Europe could no longer afford to host a World Cup, so Brazil was chosen as the venue for the 1950 tournament, with FIFA generously rewarding the AFC with one of the 16 places, and the Asian qualifiers for the 1950 World Cup, which included the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia and India, abandoned the tournament before it had even begun, due to a lack of funds. However, due to lack of funds, the Philippines, Myanmar and Indonesia forfeited their matches before the qualifiers could be played. India were the lucky ones to qualify for the World Cup without playing a single qualifying match.
Due to the mass absence of European teams for various reasons, and Argentina’s refusal to participate. In order to have 16 teams to avoid an embarrassing World Cup, Brazil, as the host, had to pull teams from all over South America, and the average Bolivian and Paraguayan teams barely made it to the tournament.
Failure to come to the competition
Originally placed in Group 3 with Italy, Sweden and Paraguay, India failed to qualify for the tournament for various reasons, missing out on their only chance to show off their empire in the World Cup.
Although it was later rumoured that FIFA did not allow the Indian team to play barefoot in the tournament, the Indian team regretted not being able to participate in the tournament. But the fact is that FIFA’s specific rules on the equipment of players taking to the field of play were not formalised until 1953.
The real history, perhaps, is that the then All India Football Federation (AIFF) was totally helpless at the huge cost of about Rs 100,000 crore, and that travelling some 15,000 kilometres to Brazil for the World Cup, which was of lesser importance than the Olympics, was seen by corrupt and stupid Indian officials as totally unnecessary and better used for embezzlement. So although the football associations of the Indian states actively crowd-funded the Indian team’s participation costs and FIFA made the difficult decision to cover most of the Indian team’s participation costs, due to delays in information due to miscommunication and a lack of interest in participating in the World Cup, the All India Football Federation chose to lie down and sent a telegram to FIFA ten days before the 1950 World Cup kicked off to prepare for the World Cup. Inadequate preparation time, delayed communication, and difficulties in selecting players made it the biggest mistake in the history of Indian football to announce that it would not participate in the World Cup.
The 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil ended up with only 13 teams, joining the 1930 FIFA World Cup in Uruguay as the World Cup with the fewest number of teams in history. It was a necessary stage for the struggling World Cup to evolve in an era when the World Cup was not yet a global concern and attracted attention from various countries.
Written at the end
An infuriated FIFA banned India from qualifying for the 1954 World Cup due to their last minute announcement that they would not be participating in the 1950 World Cup. The Indian team, which was outstanding and one of the premier teams in Asian football at that time, never got a chance to play in the World Cup. In those days, when there was no visual record, the strength of the Barefoot Continentals could only be described in the accounts of the people involved. As Sailen Manna, the legendary Indian footballer who was supposed to play as India’s on-field captain in the 1950 World Cup, said in an interview with Sports Illustrated, ‘Indian football would have been at a different level had we embarked on this journey.’
Indian football, which sadly missed the opportunity to develop, has been on a steady downward spiral in the years that followed. The country, whose entire population was crazy about the game of cricket, had almost forgotten the greatness it had once achieved in football and could only fight for the dignity of a great nation only in the Earth derby with China.
Failure to be the first Asian team to qualify for the World Cup as an independent nation, and failure to score the first goal of an Asian team in the World Cup, have been major regrets in the history of Indian football.
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Post time: Oct-11-2024
