Who Coached Sunil Chhetri?

On August 13, 2008, Sunil Chhetri, arguably the best football player India has ever produced, announced himself to the nation. On a muggy evening in the national capital, the Secunderabad-born striker single-handedly catapulted India towards their first appearance in the AFC Asia Cup in over 20 years—scoring a sublime hat-trick against a Tajikistan side that was set to prolong the country’s footballing misery.

I was there for that game.

At the time, I was a part of Delhi’s youth football circuit—a haphazard, barely put together collection of clubs and academies that came under the ambit of the all-powerful Delhi Soccer Association. While the talent pool was strong, mismanagement and a general apathy for all things football-related had put a significant dent in Delhi’s footballing pedigree. The capital’s footballers were also-rans, and with no success story to speak of; a lot of coaches at the time used to grasp at straws to inspire their talented pupils.

Chhetri’s performance that night against Tajikistan inspired a generation of footballers and set a benchmark for all of us. Having learnt his trade in Delhi, the striker’s ‘origins’ story should have been the bible for every kid hoping to emulate his success. However, in the absence of facts about his days as a youth player in the national capital, fabricated tales of who really honed Chhetri’s talent became the stuff of legend and widespread scorn amongst players. As Chhetri’s on-field successes have climbed new heights—he’s now the third-highest active international goal scorer in the world—the stories that I came across as a player back then have been nagging away at me for a while.

Since the Tajikistan game, almost every coach in the city tried to claim Chhetri as one of their own— regaling their squads with tales about how they were the ones who were responsible for his success. After all these years, it’s time we get some answers to the burning questions about India’s Captain Fantastic—who really coached Sunil Chhetri? I mean, there’s definitely going to be a Netflix special or at least a haphazard attempt at a biopic in the future, and it’s only fair that we get to know about the people who helped him reach where he is. By getting to know a bit about Chhetri’s time as a player in Delhi, we can, at the very least, prevent the butchering of a character who has an important role to play in the aforementioned special. There’s every chance of a sequence similar to Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal in which Tony Singh aka Boman Irani teaches John Abraham how to hold off a defender outside a Southall pub being used as Chhetri’s training montage in Delhi. It is our moral imperative to prevent that from happening.

There’s little to no information available about Chhetri’s days at City FC Delhi and who really coached him as a young player, so I reached out to old teammates to put down some prime candidates from back in the day and the stories that they told all of us.

From Mr Sahoo, my former coach at the Delhi Public School R.K Puram, to Mr Jasmer Singh, coach at DDA Academy Siri Fort which trained the city’s best players, everybody claimed to have come across Chhetri as a young player back in 2002. In 2008, our training sessions at Delhi Public School R.K. Puram culminated with us having to avoid multiple golf balls being aimed at us by the erstwhile principal at the school. It was at these sessions that Mr Sahoo claimed that he’d taught Chhetri how to improve his left-foot, and how his training, which essentially involved dodging more golf balls, was responsible for the screamer that Chhetri had scored with his left-foot in the game against Tajikistan. “There was one story about how he (Sahoo) used to conduct cardio training sessions for Chhetri,” says Ajitabh Singh, a former inter-zonal level player who used to play under Mr Sahoo. “Of course, these training sessions never made their way to us.”

Mr Jasmer Singh, on the other hand, is the more likely candidate. Known for his effervescent tirades against flailing players, Singh was responsible for coaching Delhi’s golden generation of players, most of whom passed through his time at Siri Fort’s DDA Football Academy. There’s one incident that encapsulates him perfectly—once, during a game, a player was man-marking his opponent, a fact that was annoying Singh to no end. Suddenly, he burst out, “ Uski gaand ke peeche shahed laga hai kya jo tu uske peeche phadphada ja raha hai (Is there honey stuck to his ass that you’re fluttering behind him)?” Considering Singh’s record with Delhi footballers, it seems likely that Chhetri’s story also started.

Despite numerous requests and repeated attempts, I failed to get an interview with Sunil Chhetri and therefore to the bottom of this mystery. There are other candidates, such as the diminutive fireball that was Baccheram, or the Indian Olympic football legend Mr Syed S. Hakim. Listen, Sunil, I really just want to give my due to the mavericks that made playing football in Delhi such a memorable experience, and maybe tell your story through their eyes as well.

Call me maybe?