Indian football
India against Panama, Brazil and Uruguay: what a three week camp is for, and what it is not
India play Panama in Bengaluru on 25 September, then Brazil on 3 October and Uruguay on 6 October in Kolkata. All three played at this summer's World Cup, and nobody sensible expects India to win all three. What a coach should want from this window is not the results. It is the three weeks of training the fixtures have bought.
Most of the conversation about this window has been about the names coming to India. Vinicius Junior in Kolkata. Federico Valverde on Uruguay's list. That is understandable, and for Indian football it is a genuine occasion. But if I were sitting in the staff room in Bengaluru this week, the names on the other team sheet would be the last thing on the whiteboard.
The first thing would be the calendar. Khalid Jamil named his 26 player squad on 31 August, and the preparatory camp opened in Bengaluru on 14 September, according to the AIFF's squad announcement. The squad moves to Kolkata after the Panama match. Ryan Williams put the value of that plainly in an interview published by the federation today: "Usually it's 10 days, but we have three weeks together, which is valuable time."
He is right, and it is worth explaining why to anybody who has not run an international camp.
Why three weeks changes the work
A normal international window is a rescue mission. Players arrive from different clubs, carrying different loads, having been coached in different ways all season. You get a recovery day, one proper session, a walk through, and then a match. There is no time to teach anything new. You pick the players who already understand each other and you keep the plan simple enough to survive forty eight hours of preparation.
Three weeks is a different job. You can plan a real training cycle: a loading block in the first week, when the physical work gets done and the tactical ideas get introduced on the grass, then a tapering week before the first match, then a recovery and review cycle between games. You can run the same pressing trigger forty times until it becomes a reflex instead of an instruction. You can put the back four through their distances until they stop looking at each other before they step up.
That is the part of international coaching that India rarely gets, and it is the part that decides whether a national side has an identity or just a selection. Club coaches in the Indian Super League, which starts its new season on 10 October, will be watching closely too, because the habits that come out of this camp go back to their dressing rooms.
What the last window told the staff
The honest context is not flattering. India did not qualify for the 2027 Asian Cup; the campaign effectively ended with a 2-1 home defeat to Singapore in Goa last October, as ESPN's analysis of the qualifying failure set out. The next real test came at the Unity Cup in London in May, where Jamaica won the semi final 2-0 at The Valley on 27 May.
The federation's own match report is candid about how the goals came. The first arrived in the eighth minute from a quick counter after a failed clearance. The second came from a lapse that gave Kaheim Dixon space near the box. In between, India improved after half time and pushed higher, but did not create enough in the final third.
Read that as a coach and you get two separate problems, and they need separate solutions. One is rest defence: how the team is arranged behind the ball when it has it, so that losing possession does not mean three players are running back towards their own goal. The other is final third quality, which is partly personnel and partly patterns. A three week camp can fix a good part of the first. The second takes years, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The squad has changed, and the omissions say more than the call ups
Look at who started against Jamaica and then at the list for this window. Sandesh Jhingan, Rahul Bheke, Lallianzuala Chhangte and Jeakson Singh all started at The Valley. None of them is in the 26. Liston Colaco is not there either. Khel Now's reading of the squad counts Jhingan at more than 70 caps and Bheke at 50. That is a lot of experience left at home for three games against World Cup sides.
I would not rush to call it a purge, because I have not seen the reasons set out anywhere. But the shape of the selection is clear enough. Anirudh Thapa is back for the first time since the Intercontinental Cup match against Mauritius in September 2024. Two players who came through the under 23 side, Mohammed Sanan and Macarton Nickson, are in, and the AIFF interviewed them together this week. Nickson's line about his team mate is the kind of thing I like to hear from a young player, because it is about the game rather than the occasion: "He takes on defenders one-v-one and he's not scared, whoever it is."
If you are going to change the spine of a team, a long camp with no qualification points at stake is the right time to do it. You can find out whether a new centre back pairing talks to each other properly without it costing you a tournament.
Panama first, and Panama matters most
If I had to pick the most useful of the three matches for India's development, I would pick the one that will get the least attention. Panama in Bengaluru on 25 September, moved forward a day from the 26th, at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium.
Panama had a painful World Cup. They were drawn with England, Croatia and Ghana, lost all three, and did not score, going down 1-0 to Ghana to a goal in the fifth minute of stoppage time, 1-0 to Croatia and 2-0 to England, according to the Group L record. But the detail that interests me is from that first game: Panama had 62 per cent of the ball against Ghana. That is a side that wants possession, is organised enough to keep it against good opposition, and struggles to turn it into chances.
That is the perfect opponent for a camp built around rest defence. India will spend long spells without the ball and will have to press a team that is comfortable playing through pressure. And every time India win it back high up the pitch and lose it again, the question from May comes straight back. It is the Jamaica problem again, at a higher level, in front of a home crowd. If the structure behind the ball is better on 25 September than it was on 27 May, the camp has already done its job.
The venue helps. The AIFF's piece on the Kanteerava recalls the SAFF Championship final there on 4 July 2023, when India beat Kuwait and Gurpreet Singh Sandhu saved a penalty from Khaled Hajiah. He called the stadium "the Fortress", and a noisy home crowd for a side that has been through a difficult year is worth something.
Brazil and Uruguay: set the right exam
Then it gets much harder. Carlo Ancelotti's Brazil squad includes Vinicius Junior, Raphinha, Endrick, Marquinhos, Gabriel Magalhaes, Bruno Guimaraes, Estevao and Joao Pedro, as National Herald reported when it was announced. Brazil play Australia in Townsville on 25 September and in Brisbane on 29 September before coming to Kolkata.
Uruguay are now coached by Diego Forlan, who will be remembered in this country for his spell with Mumbai City FC in the ISL. His preliminary list for the window, reported by NewsX and others, includes Valverde, Rodrigo Bentancur, Ronald Araujo, Jose Maria Gimenez and Darwin Nunez. Bentancur is a name Tottenham supporters will know, and I am curious how Forlan uses him while Spurs go through their own difficult start. Uruguay went out of the World Cup in the group stage after drawing with Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde and losing to Spain, so a new coach will want a performance too.
The mistake a coaching staff can make with matches like these is to set the wrong exam. If the target is the scoreline, the team defends in a low block for ninety minutes, loses 2-0, and everybody calls it respectable. The players learn nothing they did not already know, except that they can suffer.
A better exam is narrower and more honest. Pick two or three things the camp has worked on and measure only those. How many times does the back line hold its shape after India lose the ball in the opponent's half? How many times does the first pass after a regain go forward rather than sideways? Can the midfield three stay connected when Brazil start rotating positions around them? Those can be counted. They can be put on a screen in the video session the next morning. And they transfer straight back into the next competitive fixture, which a 2-0 does not.
Jamil's own framing is sensible. "This is a very important window for us, with three challenging matches against teams that have played at the World Cup," he said when the squad was named. Thapa put the players' side of it well in his interview with the federation: "once we enter the pitch, it is 11 against 11." He is right about what matters. The shirts do not decide who wins a second ball.
Load: the unglamorous risk
There is one more thing I would have on the whiteboard, and it is the least exciting. Three matches in eleven days, a flight across the country in the middle of them, and a domestic season starting days after the last game. The ISL begins on 10 October, four days after Uruguay.
That means the staff have two jobs at once. Get the players ready for three demanding matches, and send them back to their clubs fit to start a seven month season. Rotation between Brazil and Uruguay is not a sign of disrespect to either opponent. With the games three days apart, it is the correct decision for most of the outfield players. The damage from overloading a player in early October tends to show up in November, when nobody connects it to the international window any more. We have seen the same pattern at Tottenham this season, where a rotated side at Anfield told the staff more than a full strength one might have.
What I would call a good window
If India lose all three matches and the structure behind the ball is visibly better in October than it was in May, that is a good window. If the new names come out of it with minutes, a clear role and no injuries, that is a good window. If India steal a result against Panama and then get taken apart by Brazil because the plan was abandoned at the first goal, I would call that a worse window than three narrow defeats, whatever the headline says.
This is how I think about coaching generally, and it runs through the way I approach the job: plan backwards from the behaviour you want, not forwards from the next result. A camp is a block of work. The matches are how you check the work.
I am looking forward to Kolkata as much as anybody. But the fixture I will be studying most closely is the one in Bengaluru on 25 September.