AIFF have appointed the Romanian Doru Isac as the technical director of the Indian National Football team for a period of three years. Doru will replace stand in technical director Savio Medeira who took over the position after the Australian Scott O’Donnell resigned in 2017.
56-year-old Isac was part of the initial shortlist of three candidates (Gaioz Darsadze & Jorge Castelo were the others) interviewed by the AIFF Technical Commitee headed by former Indian international Shyam Thapa. Doru has served as assistant coach to Arsene Wenger at Nagoya Grampus Eight, Japan, and has also worked with Carlos Queiroz and the Serbian football manager Bora Milutinović.
The Romanian has extensive experience in Asia and has worked with teams in Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Qatar. Interestingly, Doru Isac is the only candidate who travelled from Boston to do the interview in person. However, he was stuck at the Delhi airport due to visa formalities and took the interview with AIFF over Skype from the airport.
He has an excellent profile and his work speaks for himself, but we cannot ignore the fact that he was the only one who wanted to do the interview in person.
His presentation was was very impressive. He showed us how Indian football can move forward.
Kushal Das, AIFF General Secretary
Shyam Thapa spoke about what the role entails and the main focus seems to be on youth development and coaching education with the progress of the national team in the ambit of the head coach who will be appointed next month.
All the three candidates had very interesting propositions, but Isac’s youth development programme and coach development programme was very impressive.
Scouting of talent from all over the country is another important job he will be tasked for. The coaches cannot do that. Doru will have to visit all over the country, visit the academies, districts and states to scout talent.
Shyam Thapa, Chairman, AIFF Technical Committee
According to Kushal Das, the appointment is nearly complete and is being formalised – Doru is expected to formally take charge as technical director sometime next week.
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