"I am a little bit [tired]," says Lallianzuala Chhangte to ESPN after joining Mumbai City FC's pre-season training camp in Thailand, just a couple of weeks after playing a pivotal role in India's SAFF Championship victory. A season that began over a year ago, with preparations for last season's Durand Cup, finished with Chhangte only spending a few days at home before coming back for the grind with the defending Indian Super League (ISL) shield winners.
In that period, Chhangte played 3460 minutes across 42 matches for club and country. However, he has once again hit the ground running.
"From the first day [of pre-season training], I joined the boys. I did the beep test, and I finished first. I won the test!" Lallianzuala Chhangte
Chhangte isn't complaining about the lack of rest he's had, instead taking the positives from the number of games and number of minutes that he has been able to play in the last year. "This is what the European clubs are doing, the good European players are doing. I'm fortunate enough to get enough games and camps," he said.
In the last year, Chhangte has been a player reborn, but he isn't in the mood to rest on his laurels. "Even if you have had the best season of your life, there's always room for improvement, right? I will always try to see what I can improve and work on that," he said.
That is evident from how he prepared for penalty shootouts, with his teams involved in three of them already in 2023. Chhangte scored his penalties in shootouts for Mumbai City against Bengaluru FC in the ISL semifinal and then for India against Kuwait in the SAFF Championship final. He was slated to be the fifth taker against Lebanon in the semis, but India had won the shootout by then.
"After every session, I used to take 3-5 penalties every day. I used to ask the goalkeepers, 'when you saw me, what were you thinking?' They usually said, 'when I saw you putting the ball on the spot, you look at the place where you want to put the ball in.' So I have to put the ball exactly where I want to, to score."
It is this attention to detail that has been instrumental in Chhangte's rise, but he also especially credited a couple of his teammates. The two strikers he has mostly played with for club and country in the last year [Jorge Pereyra Diaz and Sunil Chhetri] have set the standards that he wants to emulate, and that is pushing him through the fatigue barrier, with pre-season widely being regarded as the time when fitness standards are set, to help players come through the gruelling demands of a long season.
"They have similar approach to the game, both Chhetri bhai and Diaz," Chhangte says. "They run like they want to win the ball no matter what. When I see them running so hard, they are like 30 years and above, running, wanting to win the ball so much, it gives me so much energy and motivation to run with them, run along with them, to help them."
Before the Durand Cup last year, Mumbai City head coach Des Buckingham told ESPN that his staff was doing a lot of work with Chhangte to improve his output in the final third. The result was the winger becoming the ISL's player of the season, while also contributing to Igor Stimac's Indian team, taking some of the goalscoring burden off the shoulders of Sunil Chhetri. Where does he go next?
Buckingham says that now it's about recognising how this is the new norm for Chhangte. "For me now, it's not form. It's about recognising that this is now the player that is here. That is now the norm that I'm sure he expects and the norm that we expect," he said.
Both Chhangte and Buckingham recognised that opponents will now view him differently, and that brings with it its own set of challenges. "I think players are going to come hard on me," Chhangte said.
"Now it's a different approach to development," Buckingham said, "now it's about finding solutions to other problems. People would have seen what he did last year, and they'll come up with different ways to stop that. We need to recognise that and work towards solving it."
Chhangte's new season begins on August 5 with Mumbai City's Durand Cup opener, and his short-term targets are very clear.
"The Golden Boot [he won at last year's Durand Cup], let's go for one more!"