New Delhi
\nIndian football captain Sunil Chhetri was named an \u2018Asian Icon\u2019 by the game\u2019s continental governing body on his 34th birthday and received effusive praise for rivalling the world\u2019s greatest players of his generation in scoring international goals. Chhetri is currently the highest goal-scoring active Asian player with 64 strikes from 101 matches, and third in the world after superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.<\/p>\n
The Asian Football Confederation made his birthday a memorable one by presenting, on its official page, the highlights of his life and career. \u201cIn the era of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, to be the third-highest scoring international footballer in the world is no mean feat, and for an Asian player to be within one goal of Messi\u2019s 65 goals for a national team is a record our latest inductee on the \u2018Asian Icons\u2019 list should be proud of,\u201d AFC wrote.<\/p>\n
Describing Chhetri as one of Asia\u2019s greatest footballers, AFC said, \u201cIn a cricket-mad nation, Chhetri was raised in a footballing family, his father represented the Indian Army team while his mother and aunt were international footballers for Nepal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChhetri caught the football fever, but never imagined how far he would go. Little did the India captain know he would go on to surpass a century of caps and score 21 international goals since 2015 to rival the world\u2019s greatest players of the generation and lead his nation to a fourth AFC Asian Cup in their history with four goals in the qualifiers,\u201d AFC said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New Delhi Indian football captain Sunil Chhetri was named an \u2018Asian Icon\u2019 by the game\u2019s continental governing body on his 34th birthday and received effusive praise for rivalling the world\u2019s greatest players of his generation in scoring international goals. Chhetri is currently the highest goal-scoring active Asian player with 64 strikes from 101 matches, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38264,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38265,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38263\/revisions\/38265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}