New Delhi: Indian football’s technical director Rob Baan emphasizing on country’s FIFA rankings said that they should be ashamed of it and should work hard to improve their position in World football.

Talking at the panel discussion 'Mission Rank 100: Myth or Reality?' organised by FICCI here, Baan said "We should be ashamed of the low rankings. A country like Iceland, which has so less population compared to Indi are ranked around 60 in FIFA charts and we are at 168th. We have just 114 points and it is so much less in numbers.”

"There should be no excuses for our rankings. We lost to Singapore 0-2 in the international friendly and it means we were not good enough. We have a lot of work to do and there are so many gaping holes," added Bann.

Bann who has served as an assistant coach of the Netherlands and technical director of the Australian team before taking up the job with the AIFF felt that breaching into top 100 is possible but then lot of work needs to be done on this.

"FIFA rankings in general give picture of the standard of football in a country. Spain is number one in FIFA rankings and rightly so. The Netherlands were second some time back and they were now pushed down to sixth after losing a few games," said the 69 year old Dutchman.

"We can reach top 100 by 2018, but then to achieve it we will have to start from the grassroot level. We have to focus on the youth development and infrastructure, academies, education of coaches," he added.

Bann’s statement is quite contradictory to the national team players who time and again said that FIFA rankings are very deceptive and do not give their real picture of the team and they are a far better side that what the rankings say.

By Indian Sports News Network