AIFF Media Team

NEW DELHI: “It was so long ago,” Inder Singh recalls softly and then falls silent. A few moments pass before he continues, or tries to. “It is difficult to remember,” he adds, pausing, taking time. “But…” another long pause. “It was never about one goal, or one player. Football is not like that.

“When I was playing, I knew,” he says eventually, “I knew exactly which goal I scored when, and how I scored it. When I was a player, I knew…”

The legend of Indian football, on Friday, December 23, 2022, turned 79. It wasn’t easy to lead him down the memory lane; but he eventually did and as he did, it opened a box of magical skills that dazzled thousands during his playing days.  

As a youngster Inder had built a habit. In the evenings after games, he’d sit and list the goals he’d scored into a diary. Part historian, part analyst, this was his introspection. The practice lasted a few years, then the sheer number of the goals outran his log-booking. It became tough to keep count. “In my 25-year career, I must have scored 500 goals,” he says. That’s a lot of meticulous record keeping, perhaps worthy more of a historian than a footballer. 

Not just any footballer either. He was an unbelievable goal scorer who scored barely believable goals, and at a rate unsurpassed. In the 1974-75 Santosh Trophy season alone he scored a record 23 goals in only seven outings — a hat-trick against Bengal in the final against Bengal in the final — leading the line and leading a rout as Punjab powered to the title. "Punjab scored 44 goals and my share was more than half of them", he says.  

The eager youngster is now a respected, retired, fabled sage, yet the timidity and the hesitation to talk about himself remains intact. He never talks about his goals, preferring instead to focus on what they, the teams he was a part of, achieved while he was with them. “We were coached by the legendary Jarnail Singh, a hard taskmaster, who had us in camp for a month before the tournament,” he says. “There was a good feeling all around.”

“Goal scoring is not an individual pursuit,” Inder says. “In our time there was no one logging passes, assists and all that, but when you scored a goal, you knew it was just the end of something that had taken a lot of work prior also. There were always a lot of people involved. Everyone did their jobs, and mine was to score goals.”

Yes, sure, but goalscoring is an art form, and goalscorers superstars. In the rock band that is a football team, the goal scorer is the lead singer, the frontman, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Jim Morrison rolled in one. Outspoken, brash, flamboyant, swashbuckling… words that exist in a dimension that Inder does not inhabit. He is humble, reticent, and, even now, reluctant to talk about his own brilliance and all those years at the top of the game. 

This simplicity has passed through generations. Inder’s own father was a farmer and his mother a homemaker. There was no root for football and yet when he went to school, he played it, his talent obvious to everyone around. He ended up the top-scorer in the All India School Games in 1960 and ‘61, while also doubling up as a sprinter at state-level competitions — something, he says, that helped him as a striker. He started playing for Leaders Club in school, before earning a professional contract with them at 19.

Inder’s brilliance on the pitch predated his exploits in the Santosh Trophy of course. He made his India debut against South Korea at the AFC Asian Cup in Tel Aviv on the day Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru passed away, the match thrown into jeopardy because of what had happened. As it was though, the game went on, and Inder scored India’s second in a 2-0 win. He was feted at the tournament, finishing as the joint top scorer as India lost out on the title to hosts Israel.

Inder’s quick feet, natural stamina and uncanny ability to find the goal won him many admirers, even offers from abroad. For him, not those allures. He stayed home, where he loved to play, and where they loved him playing. “Mohun Bagan and East Bengal would always send people to Phagwara to convince me to join them,” he says. “I sent them back politely.” 

With the Santosh Trophy geared to kick off — on his 79th birthday no less — Inder’s record will stand up to scrutiny again, if not to be broken, then at the very least to be paid homage to. The tournament itself was a huge success in Malappuram last time out, huge crowds gracing the stage as Kerala, the hosts, ran out champions. In a manner not seen too often, a lot of those players became legends, cult heroes at the very least.

“The Santosh trophy does that,” Inder says. “Many of us also went on to cement our names in folklore. I may have got the goals, but without Manjit Singh and Harjinder Singh we would not have been so dominant. It was a team of personality, of character.”