He is considered one of the finest footballers the country has ever produced but today Tulsidas Balaram is a disillusioned man. A member of the 1962 Asian Games gold-medal winning team, Balaram finds it difficult to accept that India are not part of the World Cup extravaganza, while countries like Australia, Japan, Korea and Iran are.

Talking to The Indian Express on the sidelines of a felicitation programme, the septuagenarian said: “While I am happy that the Asian teams have got their pride of place in football’s biggest stage, I am also pained to see India nowhere in the scheme of things.

“We really had given these sides a beating. At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics we played Australia and beat them 4-2. Everybody said it was a fluke and the Aussies even threw us a friendly challenge, saying we couldn’t beat them if we played again. We thrashed them 7-1 at Sydney. Fifty years later, the same country is playing in the World Cup quarter finals, while we are languishing at the bottom rung,” he said.

The 1962 Asian Games was the last time India won gold and in that edition they beat Japan and Korea. “The Japanese were easy meat. We beat them 2-0 in the semi-finals. In the final we beat Korea 2-1.

We had also beaten Iran (3-0) in an international meet in Ernakulam three years before that. At that time we were an Asian superpower, and now we go over the moon when we win the SAFF meet,” he said.

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