Former international Syed Sabir Pasha is now an Asian Football Confederation's ‘A' licence coach, after successfully completing the elite course held at Jamshedpur in December 2009.
Pasha is among the eight who had passed out of the 20 who had attended the course conducted by Sivaji Narayanan Nair from Singapore, a member of the AFC's Elite coaching instructors' panel.
The former India player, the last to represent the country directly from Tamil Nadu, is now the third official in the State to get this coveted certificate. Soundararajan (S. Railway) and S. Thulasi (ICF) are the others.
An Assistant Manager with Indian Bank, for which he had served as player and currently serves as the coach, Pasha has been involved for over two years with the national football development programme. He has been deputy to Technical Director Colm Toal under whom he had worked with the national Under-16 and Under-19 teams. “Working with Toal was a great experience, an education in itself,” he said.
It is a reflection of the impression he had created with the people at the helm that he was shifted to the Under-23 team to work under Sukhvinder Singh. “I was assistant to him in the team that went on to earn success in the SAFF cup in Dhaka,” he recalls with delight.
Pasha, who helped India win the gold medal in the SAF Games held in Chennai in 1995, is keen to be the ‘chief coach' of a national team one day. “That is my aim,” he said even as he looked forward to making Indian Bank team a strong force as it was once while being a participant in the country's premier national league.
