Nowadays we are happy with even the Saff Cup: Balaram

“We really had given these sides a beating. At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics we played Australia and beat them 4-2. Everybody said it was a fluke and the Aussies even threw us a friendly challenge, saying we couldn’t beat them if we played again. We thrashed them 7-1 at Sydney. Fifty years later, the same country is playing in the World Cup quarter finals, while we are languishing at the bottom rung,” he said.

The 1962 Asian Games was the last time India won gold and in that edition they beat Japan and Korea. “The Japanese were easy meat. We beat them 2-0 in the semi-finals. In the final we beat Korea 2-1.

We had also beaten Iran (3-0) in an international meet in Ernakulam three years before that. At that time we were an Asian superpower, and now we go over the moon when we win the SAFF meet,” he said.

The player, known for his dribbling and passing skills, said the All India Football Federation (AIFF) was better than him at that. “Gimmicks are all the AIFF believes in. It’s talking of project 2010 and 2014, but amazingly it doesn’t have a blueprint for that. A foreign coach has come and he trains with the national team for just four days before going to an international tournament. There has been lot of talk of developing the game at the grassroots level, but what has the AIFF done about that?”

The future? “Honestly, very bleak.”