Skip to main content

India notch first win in FIFA World Cup qualifiers

BENGALURU: Robin Singh helped India break their losing streak in the FIFA World Cup qualifiers. Playing at his favourite stomping ground, the Bengaluru FC forward scored the winner against Guam to earn India their first win in six matches on Thursday.

Under heavy rain at the Sree Kanteerava stadium, Robin turned his marker at the edge of the box and fired a thunderous shot with his right to give India the lead in the 11th minute. India held on despite being down to 10-men for the whole of second half after medio Sehnaj Singh was ejected in the 42nd minute for a dangerous tackle.

The win helped India stay alive, at least till their next game away to Iran in March next year, in their quest to qualify for the 2019 Asian Cup, while the defeat almost crushed Guam's hopes for a top-2 finish ahead of Oman to advance to the third round.

"I'm happy that we won but we beat Guam and not Iran so don't get very excited. We need more international experience. If you ask any U-19 player how many games he will say 40-50 games but if you ask the same question to an English U-19 he will say 250 matches. That's the difference. You need to give them more exposure to help them graduate to the Indian team," India coach Stephen Constantine.

Despite playing with an extra man for the whole of the second half, Guam failed to make it count as India held on showing great hunger to score their first victory. Though most of the action was in India's half Guam never looked like scoring as the Indian keeper Gurpreet Singh Sandhu and the defence marshalled by Sandesh Jhingan played their hearts out.

Their best chance came in the 79th minute but Marcus Lopez blasted wide with only 'keeper Gurpreet to beat after being set being set up by Ryan Guy. Guam went close at least twice more but Gurpreet was in no mood to drop three points. With the defence and Gurpreet in full alert, India relied on fast counters to double their lead. In the 71st minute, Chhetri almost made it 2-0.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »