Igor Stimac Interview: 'India will not change their attacking philosophy in Asian Cup'

An Indian defender nutmegging a foreign counterpart to set in motion a title-winning goal is a rarity in this part of the world. But that is exactly what transpired on the pitch as Nikhil Poojary outfoxed Lebanon’s Hassan Saad and Lallianzuala Chhangte took the pass to create a goal for Sunil Chhetri which took India to the Intercontinental Cup 2023 title.

.@nikhilcpoojary’s behind-the-back nutmeg 🤯
➡️@lzchhangte7’s lighting fast step over and cross 🤩
➡️@chetrisunil11’s perfect finish 🥰

Don’t know how we’ll ever get over this #BlueTigers 🐯 goal 😱😱😱#HeroIntercontinentalCup 🏆 #IndianFootball ⚽️ #INDLBN ⚔️ pic.twitter.com/ySc2Xk6IOt

— Indian Football Team (@IndianFootball) June 19, 2023

This was India’s second title in 2023 — also a rarity. Playing with panache and possession, India are currently on a 13-game unbeaten home run which also includes record eight straight clean sheets. And making this revolution from the touchline is Igor Stimac, former U-20 world champion, 1998 World Cup bronze medallist and ex-Croatia head coach. One of the first promises which Stimac made upon arrival in India was to change the team’s playing style. While former coach Stephen Constantine did admirably well to take India to AFC Asian Cup 2019, there were question marks over the longball playstyle. Stimac on that front has been highly successful. The team over the years has ditched the defensive strategy for a more expansive brand of football which sees players press high and stitch passes with purpose while maintaining a robust defensive shape. Will this strategy do wonders for India at the Asian Cup 2023, where they will face far superior teams in Australia, Uzbekistan and Syria? Firstpost spoke with India men’s football coach Stimac to decipher how the Croat changed the fundamentals of the team, find out how aggressive he plans to be in the Asian Cup, his thoughts on India’s first XI, Sunil Chhetri’s contribution and his future with the team. Excerpts from the interview: You joined the team in 2019 and have been in India for a while. India’s style has evolved since. It’s easy to bring this kind of change at the club level, but not so easy with the national side. How difficult it was to change the playing style and what are the key elements that helped you to make this journey possible? Igor Stimac: Many questions in one. I will take you to the beginning; what I said at the first press conference. Football is a process and you need time to make huge changes. At my first press conference, I was very open, very sincere about what needs to be done. And the first goal was to change the mindset of the players. It is again a process which requires time. Because coming to a country where a certain style of play in the national team was implemented, which was a very old fashion style of football, radical changes were required. So, we started looking out for more technical players, looking for younger players. Using the fantastic project which was done by AIFF with Indian Arrows as a core base of these future players of the national team. To explain to you how the process works. I said in the first press conference that this process is the road which will have a lot of suffering on its way and I asked for unity from media and all the stakeholders and everyone, and it never happened. Anyway, we succeeded without the support of everyone. Being criticised on our way, only because those people could not recognise what was happening inside…Now we are in the stage where we have a national team which is making the Indian nation proud of the way they play, of their attitude, of their behaviour, of their warrior attitude which we instilled in them. They are like brothers on the pitch and that is what I like about them. What is going to happen next? I don’t know. I (have) said many times what is required for the national team. I had a good understanding with ex-people in AIFF, with ex-president Praful Patel and Mr Kushal Das (secretary). Abhishek Yadav (ex-AIFF deputy general secretary) was of great help in AIFF. Fantastic communication and support we had from him because he was an ex-player, he knew what was needed for the national team. Now we have new people, very ambitious people who are providing us what we need and everything started half a year ago and it was not easy. When you are already late it’s not possible to organise things in the best possible way but we have what we require; home games, home matches. I need many home matches because everyone who is in football knows this. When you play home matches, it is far different. You bring teams to your ground; you bring them to your country. They have problems travelling instead of us. Throughout the two years of the pandemic travelling everywhere to Arab countries, facing Arab teams, facing referees who were supporting them, not having enough time for preparation and all that. Nobody had any understanding of what was our problem there. And it was obvious, because, in my four years tenure here, we only had two longer camps which are required at this stage of quality in Indian football for our team to prepare well for international games. And that was prior to the opening games in the World Cup qualifiers 2022 when we had good performances against Oman and Qatar. And it was obvious that it was working, that it is giving results and after that, we had a longer camp prior to the third round of the qualifiers for the Asian Cup and again it worked. And now this is the third time and it is working. Showing everyone what we can do if we are provided enough time to work together, to spend time together. Now the question is what are we going to do about the preparation for Asian Cup? Are we still thinking that 10 days and 12 days are still enough for the team to prepare? No, it’s not. And if so, I will not take responsibility for the results, simple as that. Those who will make such decisions about how long will be the camp will need to take responsibility, not me. Because you see now our players will go to their clubs. They will need to switch to the club’s philosophy of football, maybe different roles and positions in these roles. Some of them will be on the bench, and some of them will not get enough time to play. They will not be doing the same drills that we do here and I cannot change all that in 10 days. That is impossible. Because four weeks is the bare minimum we need to get for the Asian Cup. Six weeks is ideal which will be very difficult to get but with four weeks minimum we will be happy and we can take responsibility for the results, otherwise, no. [caption id=“attachment_12803492” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Igor Stimac celebrates with Croatia teammates after winning bronze medal at the 1998 World Cup. Reuters file image[/caption] You are asking your players to go on the attack in every game, yet you have had eight straight clean sheets. How have you managed to strike this balance between attack and defence? The best way of defending your goal is attacking very high. Simple as that. And the selection we executed is perfect. We have enough runners in our teams, we have enough muscle strength now in our team because we have been working for the past four years intensively in the gym. Players were given individual training programmes to be executed in the gym with their private coaches apart from the club training sessions. And normally those who are following these instructions are still with us. Those who are lazy, thinking that it’s not important, they are somewhere else and they are not part of the team. We have a simple mode of operating here. National team shirt, it’s about honour, it’s about commitment, it’s about behaviour, it’s about respect, it’s about pride. It’s not about money because players are not getting any money here but there is no greater honour in life than representing your country and these players who are here, they very well understand this. There’s still some time to go for the AFC Asian Cup but in your mind, are you close to those set of 14-15 players or because we still have some games to go with the Merdeka Cup and King’s Cup, do you still want to audition some spots? You need to understand that I have a pool of 45 players. We have a core group of players which is 23 players who are here (at SAFF Championship 2023), we do have players from the injury list and key players who are not here with us for various reasons and we do have a third list of players which are youngsters who are good prospects for the future and some of them might have good performance in the upcoming Indian Super League (ISL) season, so we need to keep open the door for everyone, but I need to say that the core base of players for the Asian Cup is here. They are here because six weeks of work here and the results we achieved and the brotherhood we have developed is something precious. All other players who are not here will find it difficult to enter the list now, that’s how it works. It will obviously depend on what is going to happen on what happens in September, October, and November. There will be injuries for sure, some of the boys will be unlucky with certain things in training sessions and the games which are coming with their club. That’s the problem with the national team. National teams have five camps in a year, five FIFA windows; it’s March, June, September, October and November. It’s actually 10 games in top countries. Every time things are changing and the lists are changing in regards to the players. [caption id=“attachment_12803802” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Igor Stimac coached Croatia national team between 2012 and 2013. Reuters file image[/caption] AFC Asian Cup is going to be a bigger challenge than what we have had so far. So, when you have Australia or Uzbekistan and because you have instilled this attacking philosophy, we may not be able to play the exact style we are following. Are you going to change your style for Asian Cup? We are not going to change our philosophy because of the opponents, that’s not the way of doing things. Even if we don’t succeed, we are not going to stop trying. I don’t mind who is on the opposite side. That’s about our mindset at the moment. We don’t mind. Whoever is there we are going to go up higher and attack with all the forces we have. That’s the India I want. That’s the India I see in the future. That’s the India which will bring all the football hearts together in this country and that’s the kind of culture we need to follow and we need to instil here. And all the clubs should follow that because that’s football. Football is not sitting back and falling on you a**. Football is about hearts. Football is about being fearless. Go out there and play the best way you can. You will fail many times like in life but you need to keep going. I want to talk to you about Sunil Chhetri. He is starting regularly for India. He wants to play regularly, also you have a lot of faith in him and his fitness is also complimenting his determination. Has he made your job easier in any way? Of course, he did. Not mainly (by) scoring goals. If he was not there some other players would have scored goals, I assure you about that. He didn’t keep playing because of his history. He kept playing because of his fitness level, because of his commitment, because of his leadership, because of everything he is doing for this nation. The funny thing is people keep talking about the same rhetoric, what after Sunil Chhetri? Instead of what we can do to keep him longer. And that’s what I do. Besides that the club was doing everything to leave him on the side and make him leave football, in the national team we were doing everything to brush the diamond more and more and more to keep the hunger going, to give more inputs on his age to have him more here with us. He is precious but no player is irreplaceable. Because we played games without Sunil and we were successful. The unit can replace anyone and then through our work another striker will be there and he will start scoring with the time and work provided here. We could see clearly when I was insisting on cutting the foreign players from seven to 3+1 following the Asian rule. It had an immediate effect. Very next season we had so many youngsters going through and appearing on the big stage of ISL and coming into the national team because of that. So why shouldn’t we try for the next five years not allowing foreign strikers to be signed in ISL or I-League clubs? The strikers who played in Bengaluru FC in recent four years are they better than Sunil Chhetri? What was the foreign players singing policy in Bengaluru which I rate as the most organised club in the country? They have the best scouting as far as I am concerned. Their youngsters are bringing fantastic energy to this national team. But I have a problem with some signing policies. If you are bringing someone who is not good enough as the striker you have, who is the legend in your club, who is a legend in this country, and you are pushing your legend on the sideline because of a foreigner which you are signing and you need to justify the money spent, pushing Sunil Chhetri on the side. I can’t see any good explanation for that. As much as I rate Roy Krishna. He was the last one. Fantastic player, a fantastic hard working guy, amazing goal scorer but he is not better than Chhetri. He is not taller than Chhetri. He is not giving you something different than Chhetri. He is exactly the same profile of a striker and if we speak about age, he is not years younger. At their age, the difference is very small. I will say that they are at least at the same fitness level. In I-League 2 now we don’t have any foreigners, but why we didn’t do this in I-League also? Why are we not opening doors for our youngsters to grow up in these positions? How are we going to help the national side rise up quickly? Why we cannot implement this criteria that for the next five years, no club can sign a (foreign) striker? What’s the problem with that? [caption id=“attachment_12803522” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Igor Stimac while playing for Derby County against Arsenal in 1999 FA Cup. Reuters file image[/caption] You have already said that the AFC Asian Cup will be the end of your tenure with India but let’s say that if you are offered to stay back, is there any possibility of you changing your mind? These are hypothetical questions so it’s difficult to answer. I don’t even want to think about such things. I am fully concentrated on the process which we started here. The point is proved that whatever I was saying, never mind how much I was criticised, I was right. And one thing is funny. You employed me here because of my knowledge and my achievement in football. First, as a young player, I was a world champion. As a senior team player, I was a World Cup bronze medallist. As a coach, I was coaching one of the best players in the world. Then you employ me here and from the very first day, you start doubting whatever I say. So, it’s really difficult now to answer all the questions which were there on that way in the last four and half years and say do I deserve to be here or do India deserve to stay here? Because it’s proved what we can do. It’s a process again. We are going to concede one goal maybe next game, maybe in five games, I don’t know when then one defeat will come and I feel somehow that doubts will start rising again. That’s the problem, faith. Not having faith in the process. I still don’t feel that there’s a huge faith in the process. And if that changes I may reconsider my opinion about the future. You need to show more trust in the people you employ and pay to do the work. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.