As Son Heung-min stole in at the front post and scored Tottenham’s second goal against Leeds United at White Hart Lane in London two weeks ago, almost 11,000km away, seven-year-old Tylan Sasikumar jumped off the couch in his Siglap home and giddily exclaimed: “Coach Indra taught us that!”
Tylan and his brother Kyen, nine, whose father is former national defender R. Sasikumar, have been soaking up specialist striker lessons dished out by former Lions captain Indra Sahdan Daud since the turn of the year.
Sasikumar, who played alongside Indra at national and club levels, said: “Who better than Indra for my boys to learn about scoring from?”
Indra, 41, hung up his boots at the end of 2016 after over two decades of goal poaching for club and country. He is still the only local-born player to score over 200 league and Cup goals in domestic football, and 31 times for the national team from 113 caps.
After retiring, he coached for a short period at a local private academy and has also assisted in a sports-based programme at Nanyang Polytechnic, his alma mater. He is now juggling his coaching lessons with a sales job.
Still looking trim despite his years away from professional football, Indra said he had been looking for a way to give back to local football and thought about how he could help an area that has been problematic for the Lions in recent years.
Enter The Finishing Touch, the football programme which offers one-to-one coaching.
DEARTH OF SOLID STRIKERS
“I’ve heard a lot of people say we don’t have good strikers any more,” he said. “We have a lot of talent out there. It’s just that they don’t have the guidance… I may not be the best coach around, but hopefully with my experience I am able to share some things to help these players.”
The dearth of top Singapore-born strikers has been an issue the Lions have struggled with over the last decade. The emergence of 21-year-old Ikhsan Fandi – with eight goals from 18 caps – has provided temporary relief but a sputtering conveyor belt is worrying.
Since 2010, 13 players have scored 20 or more goals in the S-League (now known as the Singapore Premier League). None are local. The last one to achieve the feat was Khairul Amri in 2006. This is a stark contrast to a time when the likes of Indra (in 2001, 2003 and 2005) and Noh Alam Shah (2002, 2003 and 2005) posted multiple hauls of 20-plus goals.
Said Indra: “Aside from guidance from senior heads, what is lacking these days for young talents is also exposure. At 18, I was playing in the first team of the S-League with players like Egmar (Goncalves), and Kadir (Yahaya) around me to guide me.
“But nowadays, a lot of our young players are playing alongside their peers, and sometimes they don’t get the proper guidance from other teammates too… So they don’t improve as much.”
FIXING THE PIPELINE?
Four-time S-League top scorer Aleksandar Duric, a naturalised former Singapore striker, said the dip in quality of foreigners in the domestic league has affected local football standards.
“Indra and Egmar were a deadly partnership, and he probably learnt so much from Egmar on getting in the right areas to score, and so on,” said Bosnia-born Duric.
Noting that imported strikers used to score 20 to 30 goals as compared to the current crop where not many score more than 10, he added: “So how does a local player improve if this is what he is competing with?”
Duric felt that specialist striker coaching, like the one offered by Indra, is one possible solution to fixing the pipeline of scorers. The 50-year-old said this is common in Europe and even in the region, revealing that he turned down an offer of a specialist striker coaching role with Indonesia’s national team after he retired in 2014.
Indra, whose most famous strike was arguably in an exhibition match against Manchester United in 2001, also scored against World Cup nations Japan, Uruguay and Denmark. He said his lessons for budding players are all based on goals he scored.
“I’ll break down the sequence – before I get the ball, when I get the ball, and what to do with it in front of goal,” he said. “And we’ll practise the situations. This is how I think my sessions will help. Because sometimes when you are tired, you lose focus but if you go through that motion over and over again, it becomes almost second nature to you and you’ll have that instinct and know what to do.”
• For more information on The Finishing Touch, call 9126 8514.