"Mendeeeez"
Bengaluru FC are on the attack. Down the right wing flies Ryan Williams, studs on chalk, ripping past Kerala Blasters left back Naocha Singh before entering the final third and whipping a cross to the back post. A figure in BFC blue rises high and handsome and thumps it past an unmoving Sachin Suresh in goal. Thwack goes the net. On the broadcast, the ISL commentators scream the name of who they think just scored that power header... "Mendeeeez"
Except it wasn't big Edgar Mendez (1.88m) dominating slightly smaller Sandeep Singh (1.82m) on that far post. It was someone who gave up 12 cm (at least) on the Blasters right back. A height difference among elite athletes no one has the right to make up let alone make look inconsequential. Sat in the stadium you saw immediately who it was, though.
Peeling away from his marker and drifting inside from the left wing just as Williams made his charge, pausing before making a final sprint as the cross came in, timing his jump to perfection, meeting the ball at a height barely believable for someone of his stature. Doing what he has been doing for more than two decades now, the single most inevitable act in Indian football -- when Sunil Chhetri gets that jump in, there's nothing anyone can do about what comes next.
Look back at the air he gets, the height at which he connects with the ball, the power in the header and it's easy to understand why at first glance anyone would mistake him for Mendez. It's a compliment, really, to a man who continues to make this goalscoring schtick look everyday routine.
That goal was the opener of a rollercoaster of a match. Williams would add a glorious second, cutting in and smacking it top bins with his left foot before the Blasters took over in the second half. Noah Sadaoui's persistence and Jesus Jimenez's skill saw them pull a cheeky one back before Adrian Luna waved his magic wand and put the ball on a plate for Freddy to equalise.
But this fixture has always been Chhetri's to dominate. And so it was on Saturday.
Jorge Pereyra Diaz ran through after robbing Alexandre Coeff off the ball and teed up Chhetri to calmly stroke in his second of the game. 3-2. Chinglensana Singh fed him on the counter in the very last minute of stoppage time... he killed the ball dead with his chest, sat Hormipam Ruivah down, and smashed it inside the near post. Calm, brilliant, typical Chhetri - a class finish to complete a class hattrick. 4-2, game done and dusted. Sunil Chhetri, winning the match for Bengaluru yet again.
For him, though, this game was just a continuation of this season. His pressing remains as intense as ever, as does his off the ball movement, but in front of goal he seems to have rediscovered a cutting edge. We are in the first week of December, but he already has eight goals, three better than either of the last two seasons. That puts him joint second in the ISL top scorers list this season. He's easily the top scoring Indian (no other Indian is in the top 18). All this despite starting just over half the games so far (5/11).
"That's all the money BFC had, man. They can't afford to play me every day 90 minutes," he joked at the pre-match press conference on Friday. "Every minute counts, so they are being very smart." He laughed through it all, through assistant coach Renedy Singh explaining how Chhetri's minutes need to be managed, but you could sense the anger deep inside Chhetri. He may be touching 41 now, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to run his socks off for every single minute of every single game.
"I don't like it," he said, talking about the need for a different mindset when coming off the bench. "I've been crying and cribbing to all the coaches. The good thing is... they give me a different answer every time. So at least I'm not bored"
But isn't there ever a temptation to simply rest on his many laurels? "Every day is a struggle," he admitted. "I put a nice, beautiful face in front, but it's not easy. I'm 41. It's not easy..." but? "I enjoy it. I, there's nothing else that I want to do. I enjoy playing, I enjoy training, I enjoy sprinting with Suresh, I enjoy fighting with Alex, I enjoy every bit of it. So, till the time I am, I'm here."
Besides, he said, "I don't take my records, seriously. I [think only] about the next game, to try and do as much as possible for the team, try and score. The feeling that I'm going to score will never go. In the [20+] years that I [have been playing], different coaches that I played with, different teams that I played for, different fitness levels that I've been, one feeling was always constant... that I think that I'm going to score. I don't know how many minutes I'm going to get tomorrow, but my feeling is I'm going to score."
He got the full 97 on Saturday, and boy was his feeling on point. Another game, another hattrick, another complete Chhetri performance. Change is constant, unless you're in Indian football and you're up against Sunil Chhetri in this kind of form.