Having barely recovered from a hamstring injury, Sunil Chhetri once again proved to be a match-winner for Bengaluru FC, with a sublime free-kick that took them to the AFC Cup playoffs.
When Bengaluru FC fronted up against Maziya of Maldives in their must-win clash in the AFC Cup, regular captain Sunil Chhetri wasn't even meant to feature. He had pulled a hamstring less than three weeks back, and with the Indian team set to play a critical AFC Asian Cup qualifier in less than a fortnight, it was important to see to it that Chhetri could maintain fitness for the Indian team as well.
He pulled through, though, saying along the way that while he was medically fit, match fitness was another matter.
For much of the clash on Wednesday at the Kanteerava Stadium, Chhetri appeared to be a peripheral figure, playing as the left-most point of an attacking triad comprising CK Vineeth in the middle and Alwyn George on the right. Chhetri tried to work passes with Nishu Kumar, operating on the left wing in coach Albert Roca's 3-4-3 formation on the night, and even got himself into the Maziya box a couple of times. He was always closed down by Maziya's right-back Ali Samooh, and their defensive duo of Andrei Cordos and Ali Amdhan. The few times he escaped their notice, he found the referee's assistant raising his flag to deny him a go at the Maziya goal.
He was still an influential figure on the pitch, helping soothe some frayed tempers when some of the challenges from both sides got a bit over-eager. Defending a set-piece, he was quick to hold back Spaniard Juanan, who was getting into the referee's face after he flashed the game's first yellow card to Bengaluru defender Sandesh Jhingan, for a tackle that Maziya coach Marjan Sekulovski later said should have led to a straight red.
Close to half time, Chhetri was visibly slowing down and keeping his movement on the pitch to a minimum. Was a substitution on the cards, especially with Seiminlen Doungel coming way ahead of the team to warm up?
Chhetri would stay on, though, and make the difference with a delightful free-kick that summed up his quality. The passage of play leading up to the set-piece summed up Bengaluru's team spirit on a night when they were arguably the second-best team on the pitch.
Alwyn chased down a seemingly lost cause down the left to win a corner. Off the corner, goalkeeper Amrinder Singh and right wing-back Harmanjot Khabra were the only players not inside the opposition box, as Eugeneson Lyngdoh played a short ball towards Alwyn, whose backheel almost found Juanan, but the Spaniard was brought down just outside the penalty box. The chants of "Sunil Chhetri" went up immediately, not least because it was from a similar angle that Chhetri had scored the winner against Mohun Bagan in the first AFC Cup clash of the season in March.
In the end, he made it look ridiculously simple, curling the ball over and above the wall and making it dip enough to beat a fairly tall goalkeeper in Pavel Matiash.
Chhetri realised the job was not done yet, though. Maziya played the only way they were meant to in such a situation, and missed a few gilt-edged opportunities in the process. Through it all, Chhetri was still popping up in unexpected places, and winning challenges in the middle of the park. One of the latter sparked a bit of handbags between the two teams, but Chhetri was again the first to pull his team away from the epicentre of it, leaving the yellow card to go to another Maziya player at that point of time.
When his substitution was announced around the 86th minute, it was impossible not to think back to this day two years ago, when Bengaluru had conceded an equaliser to Mohun Bagan around that mark, with Chhetri used as a substitute by then coach Ashley Westwood in a must-win match to finish off that season's I-League. He had to come on with the score on 1-1, but found too little time to make an impact, as Bengaluru's title defence slipped away on their own turf, but this time you got the impression he had done enough to send them a toenail's width away from the AFC Cup knockout stages.
Sunil Chhetri is a supremely talented footballer, but carries it with grace and dignity. When the game got over, his face was one of a relieved man, even as the rest of the team went about celebrating a difficult but important win that kept them on course to match the AFC Cup heroics of 2016. He is also articulate and sharp with his thoughts on where Indian football is today and where it needs to go from here.
At heart, though, Chhetri is still the prodigiously talented teenager who laced his boots up in the Kolkata maidan a decade and a half ago, and gave it everything he had for every inch of space on the football pitch.
The importance of the captain in a football team often sparks a debate. A football captain is not as crucial to strategy and implementation as one in cricket. Since it's not as frenetic a sport as hockey, it needn't always be the most experienced player in a team that gets the armband. Nor is it the overarching presence of a (usually) non-playing role of a Davis Cup captain in tennis. Yet there are so many important aspects of a football captain's responsibility, a lot of them perhaps behind the scenes on the training pitch, that make it an important position in the sport.
In setting that example for his teammates, he will continue to be as important a captain for club and country, whatever else might happen to the football ecosystem around him.