There's an old football saying, that would still apply in today's highly-altered approach to the game. "When you need to take away a draw, you play for a win." Even the Italians follow that, Mourinho would disregard it at his peril.On Monday, the Indian team discarded that devastatingly simple truism when they needed to employ it the most. To many newbie fans of the Indian football team, and many surprising older, seasoned converts of Indian football's ‘new dawn', it would always remain that last-gasp, injury time penalty - and the farewell tears of a coach whose posturing was always bigger than his stature - which crashed India's Asian Cup dream. But in reality, India's self-goals had begun a long time before kick-off against Bahrain.Hopefully, all the unreasonable hype about the Indian football team this past fortnight, the bright future of the game in the country, the way forward, the smokescreen of a Fifa rankings high, all the conniving spiel will abate. Because knockout by a whisker at a rare Asian Cup appearance still doesn't change the fact that Indian football still faces a very bleak future.Stephen Constantine's second appointment as Indian coach three years ago was nothing short of regressive, brought back after an unpleasant departure in his first stint. For a federation that had till then prided over not re-appointing Indian coaches, and had just begun seeing some sort of balance and shape with the senior team under Bob Houghton and Wim Koevermans , they strangely okayed the Englishman's second coming. Ostensibly at the insistence of a former India captain heading the technical committee, the self-serving manner of the appointment only highlighted the morass that had begun to set in the Indian game and a toothless, complicit administration just sat by and watched. It was symptomatic of the larger problems brewing in Indian football.An often cornered man in his second stint at the helm, Constantine survived the ignominy of a player mutiny after winning qualification to the Asian Cup. The same set of senior players here were doubting his technical capabilities at the highest level. Whether they were eventually right -- or not - in their reading of the coach's technical nous, truth was that Constantine was always fighting with this back to the wall.But this is not about Constantine alone. With the brutal, institutionalized demolition of the India's traditional club structure and subsequently, the I-League , to facilitate the takeover of a TV-based football show that will be anointed our premier football tournament next year onwards, the country's football faces problems of a larger, alarming nature.To be fair to him, Constantine, like Koevermans before him, did not shy away from pointing it out - often drawing censure from the All India Football Federation who stopped running the game in India and became watchdogs of their marketing partners, IMG-Reliance and the woefully lightweight ISL.While there is a systematic culling of the I-League - -it's organic growth giving the new powers that be an almighty fright -- it is no secret that the ISL continues to be astonishingly short on examination and challenge for the players, not to mention little or no playing time. So blinded the Indian football fan is in the glitz and the noise - the lengthy, often hollow pre- and post-match discussions on the official broadcast channel fueling it - that we fail to spot this aspect.Constantine and Koevermans' warning that the uncertainty over two tournaments and the players occupying them, would eventually tell on the national team and that a traditional club and league structure only bolstered the players' capabilities, found no traction in the AIFF. It was repeatedly pointed out that a mere three-month prime time football show - dates decided at the behest of the broadcaster and not the international calendar - was detrimental to the development and upkeep of footballers playing standards since it failed to provide the necessary challenges, and crucially playing time. It all fell on deaf ears.Accused of being dour, too defensive in his approach, it is possible Constantine was only attempting to make the most of the meagre resources at his disposal. With almost all his entire squad coming from the ISL, and his regular players not getting enough games, or being played out of position, we were made aware of the magnitude of the coach's headaches at the team's departure for the Asia Cup in December. A seasoned member of the coaching staff hinted at the forbidding nature of the problem faced by having to pick ISL players. "You need three ISL games to equal the intensity of one international game. In the days of the I-League, the push in a single game was good enough to replicate in the national team," he said. That's too many games, implying too less of a challenge and with players either benched or played out of position, it was always going to be uphill at the highest level in Asia.An ill-equipped team clearly punched above its weight at the Asian Cup, but if we, as lovers of Indian football, were seeking just another convenient escape via an improbable second round qualification, we were only conning ourselves and typically, being disloyal to the real story.