He also mentioned that the atmosphere at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was one of the best he had ever experienced. “This is one of the best atmospheres I’ve seen in a FIFA U-17 World Cup,” the 47-year-old told reporters.
John Hackworth was asked to choose one of the Indian players he liked watching in the evening. Much unexpectedly, the American U-17 coach chose the defensive pair of Anwar Ali and Jitendra Singh.
“Both their centre-backs. None of the balls were being put into the box,” he pointed out. “The goalkeeper was exceptional throughout. Blocking the game was great,” he finished.
Even after spending tons of money, Matos felt his team was not fully prepared for the world cup. He said that US had more competitive games comparing to India.
it's true that maybe we played too many club friendlies rather than getting strong international friendlies.. we probably got the best one's towards the last leg of this journey but we should still keep going and playing friendlies..I hope this group forms the core of the U19 qualifiers and helps us to qualify for the finals..that would be the real icing on the cake
Physically, players well develop better if they are playing abroad where there are very strict regimes of nutrients/exercise setup for individual players based on THEIR body growth in addition to team work/play. This is another reason for the likes of Komal to head off to Europe if possible.
@Rav92 Talking about culture, Indians born in football crazy countries have not done great either. How many British Indian footballers are coming up? How many indian Canadian ice hockey players do we know? How many Indian American Quarterbacks we know of in American Football? We never see any India origin athlete from any Caribbean countries. So somehow we are not producing talented players even when born and brought up in places where diet/training/coaching is better. We need to love football and accept it as our culture in the same way we do it for cricket.
Guys you r forgetting 1 important aspect. Experience in playing a major tournament. No one had that earlier. It makes a huge huge difference. The players were easily bogged down first 30 min. It was only later that their game opened. And because of playing for first time, it made this differerence. Also USA did not win convincingly even though score line suggests that. It happens in a game of football sometomes nothing goes your way. And yes dense was extremely good as I said earlier
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John Hackworth was asked to choose one of the Indian players he liked watching in the evening. Much unexpectedly, the American U-17 coach chose the defensive pair of Anwar Ali and Jitendra Singh.
“Both their centre-backs. None of the balls were being put into the box,” he pointed out. “The goalkeeper was exceptional throughout. Blocking the game was great,” he finished.
https://khelnow.com/news/article/fifa-u-17-world-cup-india-vs-usa-john-hackworth-post-match-press-conference
Dheeraj
Anwar