Is Sunil Chhetri The Greatest Indian Footballer?: Indian football legend Sunil Chhetri announced his retirement from international football recently. After 150 appearances for the national team, the 39-year-old will retire following India’s World Cup qualifier match against Kuwait on June 6.
This news sent shockwaves through the Indian sports discourse, with players and fans from all over the country wishing him all the best for his life outside the pitch.
Now that Chhetri has retired after a 19-year-long international career, one must ask the question: Is Sunil Chhetri The Greatest Indian Footballer?
The records suggest so. Not only is Sunil the most capped player in Indian history with 150, but he is also by far the highest goal scorer for the Blue Tigers, having scored 94 goals in 19 years. This tally puts him in third, right behind Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, on the list of active scorers in international football and fourth on the all-time list.
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His tally of 94 goals for the Indian national team is not even approached by anyone else. Legendary striker IM Vijayan, who played a massive role in India breaking through the top 100 in FIFA ranking for the first time in the 90s, only has 32 goals in 73 games and is second on the list.
While Chhetri has been highly influential in Indian football and is known across the world, the national team during the time he has been active saw some of its darkest days, falling to as low as 173rd in the rankings. But the team also broke into the top 100 a few times, won multiple SAFF championships, and made it to the AFC Asian Cup multiple times.
Someone who will give Sunil Chhetri some competition for the title of the best Indian footballer is someone whom we mentioned above, IM Vijayan. For decades after the fall of India’s golden generation in the 1920s and 1960s, India was nowhere on the international stage. That changed in the 1990s when Vijayan made his international debut. The goal machine was the face of Indian football during the resurgent years before the turn of the millennium.
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Another name that will be known more by modern fans is someone who partnered with both Vijayan and Chhetri in the forward line, Bhaichung Bhutia. Not only did he bring India into the new millennium as its star striker, but he also became only the second Indian footballer to play professionally in Europe when he signed with English side Bury in 1999.
Most great Indian players played in the middle of the previous century, such as Sailen Manna, the first captain of an independent Indian football team. Manna led India to gold in the first-ever Asian Games in 1951. In 1953, he was named among the top 10 captains in world football by the English FA.
The 1950s saw the greatest attacking trio in Indian football, now known as the ‘Golden Trio’, take shape. The first to debut among these is PK Banerjee. India’s star striker through the 50s and 60s played a major role in India becoming an Asian footballing superpower.
Tulsidas Balaram was the second member of the Golden Trio to debut for the national team in 1956. He, partnering with Banerjee and Neville D’Souza, took India to fourth in the 1956 Olympic Games. Balaram was one of the quickest footballers of his era and was considered a total footballer who could score, make chances, and fall back to defend with relative ease.
The final anime we will look at today is Chuni Goswami, the third of the Golden Trio and the man who turned down Tottenham Hotspur. Goswami was known for his unnatural ability to find space in the opposition box. He led India to a silver medal in the 1964 Asian Games. He even became a renowned cricketer later in his career, captaining Bengal to the final of the 1971–72 Ranji Trophy.
Is Sunil Chhetri The Greatest Indian Footballer?
So now we return to the question asked in the title of this piece: Is Sunil Chhetri the greatest Indian footballer of all time? His service to the national team and his global reach suggest so.
He might just be the greatest footballer this country has produced, but we must acknowledge how he stood on the shoulders of absolute legends who made it possible for him to play this game and become a legend in it.
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