Gurpreet Singh Sandhu the hope to blaze trails India football has long resisted traversing

Dileep Premachandran writes in his Eye on India column that the goalkeeper, trying to break through with a Norweigian side, represents an adventurousness rarely found in India's footballing history.

Indian goalkeeper Gurpreet Singh Sandhu shown during a 2018 World Cup qualifying match against Iran in Bangalore in September last year. Manjunath Kiran / AFP

It is nearly a hundred years now since EM Forster wrote "A Passage to India", which was part of Time magazine's "All Time 100 Novels" list.

For India’s footballers, it is the passage out of the country that has proved nearly impossible to navigate.

Even as football in both east and west Asia has grown on the back of stellar displays by their players in Europe, Indian football continues to search for its breakout hero.

Gurpreet Singh Sandhu, who kept goal for the national team in a couple of recent internationals, hopes that he will be the path breaker.

In the summer of 2014, Gurpreet, who was then 22, packed his bags and moved to Stabaek Fotball in the Oslo suburb of Baerum.

Nearly two years on, he still is not a first-team regular.

But in the past week, he has skippered the reserves and started for the first team in a 7-1 Norwegian Cup win against Sparta Sarpsborg.

Gurpreet played for East Bengal in Kolkata for more than five years.

After keeping a clean sheet for the reserves, he wrote on Twitter: “Proud to become the first Indian to captain a European team, it’s not about awards it’s about achievements. #LeavingNoStoneUnturned”.

Already, despite the lack of first-team action, he has shown far more fortitude than his predecessors.

It is now 80 years since Mohammed Salim found himself playing for Celtic in the Scottish Alliance, the reserve-team league.

After tucking away a penalty in a 5-1 rout of Hamilton Academical, his skills came to the fore in a 7-1 demolition of Galston.

"Indian Juggler – New Style" was the headline in the Scottish edition of Daily Express.

The report said: “Ten twinkling toes of Salim, Celtic FC’s player from India hypnotised the crowd at Parkhead last night in an Alliance game with Galston.

“He balances the ball on his big toe, lets it run down the scale to his little toe, twirls it, hops on one foot around the defender, then flicks the ball to the centre who has only to send it into goal. Three of Celtic’s seven goals last night came from his moves.”

There would be no more trickery though. Salim, who played with his feet in bandages, pined for his homeland and soon returned to the Mohammedan Sporting side that dominated Kolkata football in the 1930s.

Nearly three decades later, Subimal "Chuni" Goswami, named Best Striker in Asia in 1962, turned down the chance of a trial with Tottenham Hotspur – who had done the league-and-cup double in 1960/61 – because he did not know enough about the club or English football. Such insularity has since become the default setting.

Subrata Pal, one of Gurpreet’s goalkeeping heroes – Edwin van der Sar is the other – went to FC Vestsjaelland in the Danish Superliga in January 2014, but came back without playing a single game for the first team.

Sunil Chhetri, who has led the line for India for more than a decade, suffered the same fate during stints with the Kansas City Wizards in Major League Soccer (2010) and Sporting CP (2012-13).

Indian football has been in freefall since the team beat Japan to finish third at the 1970 Asian Games. Japan went in the other direction.

One of the pioneers was Yasuhiko Okudera, who scored for Cologne against Nottingham Forest in the European Cup semi-final in 1979. South Korea's Cha Bum-kun won the Uefa Cup with both Eintracht Frankfurt (1980) and Bayer Leverkusen (1988).

Their achievements paved the way for others like Kazuyoshi Miura, Hidetoshi Nakata, Mahdi Mahdavikia and Ali Daei.

And it is no coincidence that the countries they represented have gone on to make an impact even at World Cups.

India, without heroes and role models, continues to flounder. Gurpreet’s perseverance, despite the odds being stacked against him, represents a smidgen of hope.

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