2024 was an exceptionally eventful year for Indian sport. At the end of the year, ESPN India picks ten images that tell the story of the most stunning moments we witnessed in the last 12 months. Our first pick is a moment when India's greatest ever footballer said goodbye to national team colours.
It felt like a personal failure.
Not for Sunil Chhetri, not after 19 glorious years and 94 goals for India. But for his teammates, his adoring fans that together idolized him their whole lives, it was a bittersweet end to a career that deserved more. To the casual fan, to the die-hard ultra, Sunil Chhetri *was* Indian football, like another diminutive maestro was for a different sport.
Imagine if Sachin Tendulkar never got his World Cup-winning moment.
A generation he'd inspired had lifted Tendulkar to the apex of his career, but there was no such help for Chhetri. For 19 years he had fought a lone battle - there were flickers of a supporting cast with Jeje Lalpekhlua once and Lallianzuala Chhangte later, but it was never enough.
All India needed to do was beat Kuwait. Sunil Chhetri could have walked off on a high. He could have sent India to a FIFA World Cup qualifying phase it had never known, and achieved a small bit of history.
Instead, he waged a familiar lone battle, not aided by his teammates nor his manager, and where once he could even scale that mountain, this was an Everest that defeated his aging legs. And so, after that final whistle blew and his record-breaking career with the Indian national team, so littered with goals, came to an end... it came with a goalless draw. India were all but out of consideration for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, an potential earlier-than-expected exit in qualifying looming large.
He stood there alone, taking in the result. And alone he went, taking the applause of a crowd that had filled the Salt Lake stadium in Kolkata to bid him goodbye. The tifos were painfully accurate too - Chhetri holding a football with the map of India upon his shoulders. For 19 years, he'd taken that burden, and shouldered it with ease, the same ease with which he'd score something out of nothing.
Maybe that's why the tears came so freely, from the knowledge that he could no longer perform the same miracles for India. Everyone knew there would be tears when saying farewell to perhaps India's greatest ever footballer, very few could have predicted they'd be ones of disappointment. In India blue, he'd rarely, if ever, left the fans blue.
The solitude of Chhetri saying his goodbye, arms folded, tears in his eyes was the perfect representation of so many stories in Indian football. Lone battles waged, with small victories now and then against insurmountable odds, but ultimately ending in tears.
The captain, the leader, the legend, deserved so much more.