Q. How was your experience of being the coach of U-20 Indian Football team as you have witnessed many future stars of India?
Floyd Pinto : It was really good. I have often heard people saying that they are inspired by my story. But, it wasn’t easy since, I do not belong from a coaching or sports related background and I decided of taking up coaching as my profession.
The very first criteria was to pursue a professional coaching license. We coaches always have to work on ourselves everytime and we cannot say that, “Yes, I know everything”. We always have to learn more and more and with each every team we work with, during the course of our career. And being honest, I had very good people around me who always supported me and help me gain my confidence. During my days at Kenkre football club, I only had two things in my mind.
The first one being, I want to work with a residential team and secondly, I want to work at a much higher level than the level, I was presently working at. Fortunately, when I went to Goa to do my A License, this time Scott O’Donell was at the same course as well. He was very happy with the way, I approached my coaching sessions and the attitude that I had on the training pitch. We also had a discussion over coaching and he asked me whether I would like to join AIFF Academy or not, if there is a vacancy.
So I said, “Yes, definitely I would join”. Almost 6 months later, I got to know that there is an opening in the AIFF U-18 team. It was the batch of Anirudh Thapa, Jerry Lalrinzuala and others. So, I got appointed as the Assistant coach of that team. During those days, I was getting accustomed with the AIFF way of training, managing sessions, players and all. We also had to keep a track of a each and every player’s mental, physical and psychological health.
We won two U-18 I-Leagues and also won the Subroto Cup where we defeated some good teams from foreign countries like Singapore and Finland. During that time, the potential U-17 World Cup batch was getting prepared for the FIFA U-17 World Cup. All the youth teams during that time were stationed out in Goa and the environment there felt really good.
We were very much into the youth system. With the help of AIFF, we coaches were able to witness all the matches of the U-17 World Cup matches of India and attended as many training sessions as we could to witness the way, they got trained. Later on, the U-17 team got merged with my team and it was potentially called the U-20 team at that point of time. So properly, we were the AIFF U-19 and they were the India U-17 and that’s why on merging, it came to be known as the India U-19 and we went on to play the AFC Championships which happened to be my first International tournament.