I remember trying to find out as much as I could about Nepal in the days before I flew out there in 1999. It wasn’t easy. Back then, there wasn’t a great deal of information available when it came to the players and the clubs.

The other aspect was the culture: what not to do and how to behave. When you go to work in a new country, you’re their guest. You need to respect that and act accordingly. I try to do that.

We all make mistakes, though. One of mine came in Zimbabwe’s airport. I was there as manager of Malawi and tried to have a joke with an airport security officer. He thought I was being lippy. I was… well, not exactly arrested. Let’s just say ‘detained’.

I had to be rescued by the local ambassador of Malawi to Zimbabwe, who came down to verify I was their coach. It was a little embarrassing.

“We travelled from Delhi to Jamshedpur for one game. It’s 23 hours on a train. Some players got seats, others had to stand”

Thankfully there were no such situations when I first went to India in 2002. Having already spent two years in Nepal, which is on the border of India, I was fairly well attuned to the culture. I knew a bit about India’s team too, because we’d played against them when I was manager of Nepal.

They had a lot of good players – Bhaichung Bhutia, Abhishek Yadav, my assistant Venky (Shanmugam Venkatesh) – but they weren’t a very good team. They hadn’t won outside of the southern continent for 15 years, and it had been a few years since they’d won the SAFF – the regional cup.

It’s important that India is the team to beat in South Asia.

The team had very little when I first arrived there. Not even a kit sponsor. I was pretty much fighting on all fronts, for everything from training kit to balls. I remember travelling from Delhi to Jamshedpur for one game. It’s 23 hours on a train, but we weren’t able to get the sleeping carriages.

Some got seats, but others had to stand. It was a nightmare.

At that time we had one aim: to stop losing. To do that, we had to change the way we played. We had to change the mentality.