India can still go to the World Cup qualifying third round, Stimac upon defeat in Afghanistan. In spite of an embarassing loss to lower-ranked Afghanistan here on Tuesday, head coach of the Indian football team Igor Stimac is certain his squad will still make it to the third round of the FIFA World Cup Qualifiers.
158th-ranked Afghanistan shocked 117th-ranked India 2-1, delivering the national team one of its most embarrassing losses in recent memory, even though captain Sunil Chhetri scored his 94th goal for his country in his 150th game.
“Of course, I believe we can advance to the third round of the World Cup qualifying, and as I already mentioned, following a rigorous camp, we will also be a different team. After the game, Stimac apologized, “You can see that half of our players are not able to bring that intensity and I cannot change that in five days.”
“I keep saying the same thing over and over again. I hope you keep in mind that all of these players were there in June and July, and that Afghanistan is just another team like the ones we defeated and controlled in Kuwait and Lebanon.”
In his historic performance, Chhetri fulfilled expectations by scoring in the 37th minute from the penalty spot in India’s home leg of the joint qualifying round for the 2027 AFC Asian Cup and the World Cup after Haroon Amiri handled the ball inside the area.
Rahmat Akbari (71′) and Sharif Mukhammad (88′) goals in the second half, however, gave the Afghans a response, and the crowded Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium was crushed by yet another setback.
STIMAC IS SORRY
Stimac expressed regret for the loss and attributed it to his team’s poor play. “There is only a difference in intensity,” he clarified. He said that the result would have been different if he had had more time to prepare.
While Stimac denied that his team was outplayed strategically on Tuesday, he did argue that India should not have given up the penalty because of a careless error. He claimed that the Indian defence was “ineffective in checking this predictable approach” and that the Afghan attack was one-dimensional, consisting of long balls into the penalty area.
“We accomplished a lot of things right tonight, but one really bad thing was that we gave something away at certain stages in the game after controlling the majority of it. We are frozen together as a team for five or six minutes, for no apparent reason.
In addition to attempting to advance to the third round, we also need to consider our plans for what to do if we get there. We need to perform well in June in order to get past Guam and Myanmar, where we have been for the past eight years.
