India must perform consistently against top Asian teams: Bhaskar

By Jagannath Chatterjee

New Delhi, Sep 17 (IANS) India holding Asian Champions Qatar to a goalless draw in their 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers has earned a lot of praise for the team from the football fraternity across the country.

However, Bhaskar Ganguly, the legendary goalkeeper of yesteryears, has a different take.

While praising the goalkeeper and the defence line immensely, he said the front-line failed to meet the expectation.

Ganguly had captained the Indian squad in the 1982 Asian Games, the last time India reached the knock-out stage.

"The draw doesn't mean that it's an outstanding performance. What we can say is that our goalkeeper and defence played extremely well. Specially considering it was an away match." Bhaskar told IANS.

"But then I have always said that in the past and also now, we play very good football against good teams. And when I say good football, I mean it's a draw or a one goal loss. You can't call it an overall good football. It's like a lesser ranked team played well against a higher ranked team, " he said.

Ganguly was happy that the team has been able to get a point from the best team of Asia but at the same time, he said he will be much more happy when sees the team performing consistently well against the 10-12 top Asian teams.

"Without undermining the efforts of the team in the match, specially defence and the goalkeeper, I will love to see that this team is performing consistently well against top ten/twelve Asian team," Ganguly said.

But the former goalkeeper has tremendous faith in Gurpreet, who was the hero of the Qatar match. Ganguly said that Gurpreet is the best keeper in India amongst the goalkeepers that we have currently. He has some short-comings, but then with time he will overcome the deficiencies.