Srinagar: Indian football team coach Igor Stimac has warned that Pakistan may turn out as surprise of the tournament in the SAFF Championship 2023.
India recently beat Lebanon 2-0 in final to emerge as Inter Continental Cup champions and now aim to keep uts supremacy intact in SAFF Championship.
“The mood in the camp is brilliant after winning the Intercontinental Cup tournament. Every single second spent in Odisha (Bhubaneswar) helped us a lot to come to a point where we can say we can be happy with the performances. But the first step is to come to a certain point when you’re going to be happy about your players. The second step is to repeat that game after game. So that’s much more difficult. So we can expect some drops of form in certain positions until we get to a point where we can expect all our players to keep consistency, to keep the level of performance very high, which is really important for me as a coach,” Indian coach said.
Stimac warned that Pakistan may turn out as “surprise of the tournament”.
“Forget the rankings. I watched Pakistan’s match against Kenya, and Pakistan was better than Kenya away from home. They created better chances, they were more aggressive, and obviously, they are defending deeper, but from deeper positions, they come straight forward with the quality. They have six, seven players which are developed abroad. Two players play in England, one in Denmark in the first tier. So let’s not mislead the public please. Let’s not speak about rankings. We have very serious group here, very serious competition,” Stimac said.
Most of the Pakistan squad plays in European leagues. Otis Khan, an attacking midfielder, is a graduate of the Manchester United academy and currently plays for England’s second-tier club Grimsby Town FC. Abdul Samad Arshad, who is a right-winger, comes with the experience of playing at Denmark’s first-division club HB Köge. Easah Suliman is another such talent, who has represented England in youth-level competitions.