Photo: Ashish Negi
History will be made on June 10th as the Hong Kong’s men’s team will play their first competitive match at Kai Tak Sports Park. The home side will face India in a crucial Asian Cup 2027 qualifier group C clash.
The two sides last met in 2022 in a previous Asian Cup qualifying cycle and India came up 4-0 winners.
The group is so tight that a victory in Hong Kong for either side could be the difference in securing the automatic qualification spot for Saudi Arabia 2027.
Hong Kong’s 0-0 draw with Nepal at HK Stadium has resulted in backlash against HK coach Ashley Westwood so the match is a must win for HK to ease the pressure from fans & the media.
Follow coverage on the Hong Kong – India Game via https://khelnow.com/
For a few years, Indian football was on the rise and India, who also took part in the Asian Cup in Qatar, had risen to 99th place in the FIFA world rankings and the future looked bright.
The turning point was the Asian games (Hangzhou) where coach Igor Stimac and the AIFF came to loggerheads about player and team selection. Things began to fall apart and have not improved since.
India’s World cup 2026 qualifying campaign was underwhelming and dropping four points to Afghanistan derailed any hopes to make the 3rd round of matches.
Igor Stimac was eventually replaced by Manolo Marquez though India under his new tenure have not improved and the Blue Tigers just lost 2-0 to Thailand this past June 5th.
Ashish Negi is a well-known football expert for Khel Now & kindly gave his views on the upcoming Hong Kong versus India match where he highlighted that the India team are actually struggling.
Which players should Hong Kong fans look out for in the India team?
“The Indian team has been going through a bad patch for 1.5 years. We have hardly won anything or scored goals regularly from open play. The situation was so bad that we had to call back our legend Sunil Chhetri from retirement.
So one player will always be Sunil Chhetri who has scored 95 international goals and is currently the third highest international goal scorer behind Ronaldo and Messi. Other than him, Brandon Fernandes has been thick of everything good we have done recently in terms of goals.
Apuia in the midfield is a great talent and he has given great performance whenever he faced big midfielders like Ruben Neves or Hamza Choudhury against Bangladesh in the first match.”
As a long-term football observer, do you think Indian football has improved over the years?
“This depends on the narrative you see. We played the Asian Cup in 2011 from the backdoor by winning the AFC Challenge Cup in 2008, and then we went down to 172 in the FIFA Ranking in 2015. Then we did great under Stephen Constantine, not just we went to 96 in FIFA ranking, we also qualified for the 2019 Asia Cup where we defeated Thailand in the first match.
Igor Stimac took over where we had some great moments like playing 0-0 draw against Qatar away from home in the World Cup qualifiers. Under him also we qualified for Asian Cup 2023 but post Asia Cup we have had a bad time and we are struggling for any kind of momentum now”.
What is your prediction for the HK versus India match?
“It is an away game, and our form is very bad right now. I hope India will win 1-0, as in 2022, we defeated Hong Kong 4-0, and many of our current players also played in that match.”
Thank You!
Follow coverage on the Hong Kong – India Game via https://khelnow.com/
