One Sunil Chhetri, six goals: The moments that mark his greatness in India colours

And so this is to be it. One more match, and we will be calling the curtains on the greatest career the Indian national football team has seen. Sunil Chhetri — captain, record goalscorer (by some margin), record appearance maker (by some margin again) — will play his last game in India blue against Kuwait on Thursday and that will be it.

150 caps, 94 goals (only behind Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi amongst active international men’s scorers, lest we forget), and a legacy that will take some matching. Chhetri’s has been a career that has been special, one that has had a unique pan-Indian appeal, one without which Indian football wouldn’t be where it is today.

To understand this impact, we look at six special goals, and explore what they told us about his career, and about Indian football itself.

Goal #1 vs Pakistan, Quetta, 2005 (Friendly)

There isn’t any video readily available so the only way you could reconstruct the goal is if you were there, but as the tale goes, he collected a ball in the penalty box and placed a neat shot past the keeper.

No video readily available. Sigh. The greatest goalscorer in Indian football history, one of the greatest international goalscorers of all time, and we can’t be totally sure how he got his first goal. All that underlines is a bitter truth: Indian football in 2005 was going nowhere fast. Followed only across isolated pockets of the country, football was the haunt of the fanatic, the die-hard.

Ask the casual Indian sports fan and they’d perhaps name-drop Bhaichung Bhutia, or IM Vijayan, but even those mentions were rare in the mainstream. Indian football has had a rich history, of wins and upsetting odds and pulling off epic wins, but it hadn’t come close to catching the pan-Indian imagination quite like cricket. So, when a an almost 21-year-old scored on debut, it didn’t really kick up a fuss. Even among those who followed the game, it wasn’t much of a big deal. After all, his coaches had always had misgivings about his slight stature, and he was only playing in Quetta that day because the star of the show, Bhutia, was injured.

But there was something there. As his first head coach at a senior team (Mohun Bagan) — Subrata Bhattacharya (maidan legend and future father-in-law) — put it years later, he immediately showed a quality that coaches value most: “hunger”.

It’s a quality that would come to define him, that would in turn shape the destiny of the Indian football team… just that no one knew it back then. And few cared.

Goal #14 v Tajikistan, New Delhi, 2008 (AFC Challenge Cup final)

Chhetri chests a long punt down well outside the Tajik penalty box, and immediately swivels away, the touch opening up a gap from his marker. A step to steady himself and he unleashed, with his left foot, a low skimming hit that smacked into the bottom right corner, via an awkward bounce in front of the keeper.

That one was the second of three goals Chhetri scored on the night. On his 25th cap, he’d scored his first international hattrick, taking his tally to 15 by the end of the night. The goals he scored showcased his vast ability as a forward: the first was a tap-in off a rebound from two yards, the second was this long-range effort, the third started off by a mazy dribble down the left and finished off with an eerie calmness after his attempted pass ricocheted back to him. Three years after his international debut he was starting to really get into the volume business: banging in goals by the bucket.

The goals won India the Challenge Cup final, but what stood out was how he’d overshadowed Bhutia so completely (himself the scorer of an outstanding goal). 24 now, he was beginning to take over Indian football – in a way that no one else quite had until then.

Football hadn’t ever seen a hero transcend the sport in the country — certainly not outside the maidan, outside Kerala and Goa and the North-East — but the sport was about to get one. In a country that worships its heroes like few others, not having one that had universal appeal had held the sport itself back. It hadn’t come close to changing in 2008, but the hattrick signaled the arrival of a true contender, one now widely accepted at least within the football community. In front of a packed Ambedkar stadium and live on national television for once (with ESPN), the first seeds were also being planted for something somewhat bigger.

Goal #18 v Vietnam, Pune, 2010 (friendly)

The footage is shaky, taken as it from a fan cam, but the goal’s a beauty. Anthony Perreira whips one in from the right after a bit of pinball mayhem in the Vietnam half, Chhetri makes the run to the near post, and seeing the ball bounce just in front of him, takes a hop. Mid-air, he flicks it in behind his legs with his right foot.

The goal itself is one of uncommon skill, the judgement and the audacity and the self-belief needed to do it a rare quality, and it highlighted why Chhetri was getting offers to play abroad. There have been others who were asked to — Mohammed Salim wowed the Scots at Celtic, but homesickness brought him back to Calcutta. Dr Talimeren Ao, independent India’s first captain, was wooed by Arsenal but rejected them for his beloved Nagaland. Bhaichung Bhutia played in the lower divisions of England but his appearances for FC Bury were limited. None of them, though, had quite caught the public imagination. Salim’s tale pre-dates World War II and Ao came just after independence, and neither were recognised at the time (and indeed for years after). While Bhutia’s European sojourn (1999-2002) was celebrated inside football circles, outside it this was merely an interesting anecdote.

Chhetri’s attempt at Kansas City (a few months before the Vietnam match) evoked interest, though, even among the casuals. He was perhaps fortunate to have gone through this at a time when European football watching was becoming more popular in India, and thus an Indian footballer playing outside India suddenly became a more interesting proposition. Hell, it was kinda cool to name-drop Chhetri now, the only Indian (as they saw it) capable of playing outside the country.

His Kansas stint didn’t go well, and a couple of years later neither did his Sporting Lisbon bid (he played a bit for their ‘B’ team), but the romantic struggle of it all endeared him to fans and casuals alike… and he brought with him a renewed interest in the sport when he returned to the domestic football scene.

Goal #55 v the Kyrgyz Republic, Bengaluru, 2017 (Asian Cup qualifier)

The game’s at 0-0 in the 69th minute when Sunil Chhetri picks the ball off the toes of Mohammed Rafique, about ten yards outside his own penalty box, and sets off. A sliding challenge from behind is casually brushed aside, two more are skipped past as Chhetri steams into the Kyrgyz half. A one-two with Jeje Lalpekhlua and on getting the return, he smashes it in off the volley.

Hope is such a silly thing. But when the going gets tough, it’s hope that keeps us going. For the Indian football fan, the mid-2010s weren’t a great time. But every single time they went to a stadium or switched on their televisions/mobiles; they had cause for hope… that Sunil Chhetri might do something special. Like he did against the Kyrgyz Republic when with so much on the line, with the team playing turgid, insomnia-ending football, he took the ball by his lonesome and created magic.

RT if this video was the first thing you searched for this morning. #INDvKGZ #BackTheBlue #CaptainFantastic pic.twitter.com/iPxjYMyzfn

– Bengaluru FC (@bengalurufc) June 14, 2017

By now Chhetri was a much more well-known figure than he was in 2010. The better-marketed Indian Super League was dominated heavily by foreigners, but he kept scoring there, reminding everyone that an Indian can do this shtick too. His name appeared frequently in headline, his face on adverts and the back pages equally. Significantly, his international tally was swelling, and names like Ronaldo and Messi were being mentioned in the same breath as his. Now, that’s the kind of thing that attracts people, that grows a team’s reach beyond the confines of the hardcore support, and you could see it all happen real-time.

By 2017, it was not just cool to support the Indian team, it was a little not-so-cool if you didn’t atleast know Chhetri. You may not have seen a minute of actual football, but you knew the name, you knew he scored loads of goals, and you were quite unreasonably proud of him. Even for those who had little invested in the team itself, but cared about the name on the badge, the hope he represented mattered.

‘Maybe, just maybe, we could do something here, eh?’

Goal #62 v Kenya, Mumbai, 2018 (Intercontinental Cup)

On a rain-drenched pitch where the ball sticks in the grass and players slide all over, Chhetri is played in behind by Jeje. He takes a hard touch to push it forward before taking a look and scooping an outrageous high into the damp Mumbai air… where it looped over the keeper and right into the back of the net.

This was game #100 for Chhetri, a significant milestone, and he marked the occasion with a brace (this was his second). But to understand why this goal meant so much, you have to listen to the roar that followed it. You see, the first match of the tournament (a 5-0 thrashing of Chinese Taipei) had been sparsely attended — Mumbai being a city that cared very little about its football, this was understandable, for that’s how it always had been in areas outside the traditional havens of the sport. Chhetri, though, hadn’t accepted that. He put out a video on his socials, beseeching the crowd to come, to support the national team. And the city had listened. Tiny as it maybe, the Mumbai Football Arena was packed to the gills on a rainy weekday night and Chhetri delivered (in some style) as he’d implicitly promised. ‘I’m doing my bit,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘now let’s see you do yours.’

Not everyone had been happy about the video. Coach Stephen Constantine’s post-match comments said via an AIFF release, “I don’t feel we should be begging people to watch the national team. When the national team has been playing the manner, we have been playing in the last three years it was disappointing to see the turnout in the first match.” Hardcore fans couldn’t quite accept it either, the captain of the national team begging people to attend matches? ‘Can you imagine MS Dhoni doing this?’

But Chhetri hadn’t cared, and when he spoke people had listened, proving that the captain simply held more appeal than the team, or even the sport, among the masses. Indian football, as a whole, had been hoisted onto the shoulders of a 5’7″ man and he was determined to keep trudging upwards with it, on and off the pitch.

Goal #88 v Pakistan, Bengaluru, 2023 (SAFF Championship)

Chasing a back pass, Chhetri harried the keeper, who miscontrolled it. As the ball bobbled up, Chhetri got to it, and passed it into an empty net.

On first look, it’s such a simple goal. But for Chhetri, 39 now, this goal was him in a nutshell. When he announced his retirement, he’d said that he wanted to be remembered as “the luckiest and the most hard-working national team player”… and this goal was the encapsulation of that quote. What went unsaid, though, was that the luck inevitably came as a direct result of the hard work.

As he scored this 88th goal of his, and then added #89 and #90, the Kanteerava stadium in Bengaluru exploded. A traditionally non-football city, he had made it his own by the sheer heft of his goals for India and the decade-old Bengaluru FC, and that night was an indication of just how amazing Chhetri’s impact on the sport in India has been. Imagine Bengaluru’s police issuing a traffic advisory on a Tuesday night because of a football game… unheard of, but over the past two-decades that is the very thing that Chhetri had gone about normalising: slowly but steadily making the unheard-of commonplace.

Who scores 94 international goals with a team like India, really? Who gets mentioned globally alongside Ronaldo and Messi purely on the objective basis of these numbers he pulls? How does a footballer go from obscurity on debut to one of India’s most recognised, most celebrated sporting heroes, one so universally admired?

Here, it must be made clear that at no point has Chhetri ever made it about himself. He’s the hero the Indian football has craved, but he’s never claimed to be one. He has always maintained the truth that this is a team game, that everyone is important and has often picked individuals out and explicitly praised them for moments he feels have been overlooked.