The well-travelled Englishman, who was in charge of China from 1997 to 1999 and Uzbekistan in 2005, will be hoping to guide India to a good start in Group C when they face Australia at the Al Sadd Stadium on Monday.

However, when asked about the fortunes his former teams on Sunday, the 63-year-old admitted that he was pleasantly surprised to have seen them fare so well in their opening matches in Group A with the Uzbeks downing hosts Qatar 2-0 and China stunning highly-fancied Kuwait by the same score.

“Before I took charge of India, my last two national team appointments were in China and Uzbekistan and I was certainly pleased to see both of them win their first games of the tournament,” said Houghton, who has been involved in football coaching for over 40 years.

“I worked with about five or six of the Uzbek players in 2005 when we lost to Bahrain in the play-offs of the World Cup qualifiers in very peculiar circumstances. They have a lot of good players in their squad now and I’m very pleased with how well they have done.

“The performance of the China team surprised me. I was their national coach in 1998 and I think that (defender) Du Wei is the only one still around from back then. But I was still very happy to see them doing really well.

“When I was the China coach, I thought they were the number one emerging team. There was a good generation of players at that time and a few of them went on to play in the English Premier League – I think that Sun Jihai ended up playing about 250 games there. They did well, they qualified for the World Cup in 2002 and then the upward movement seemed to come to an end.

“There is a new generation of players now and I was surprised to see their result last night and I’m very happy for them. Kuwait are a very good team as we saw from them winning the Gulf Cup so it was a very important win for China.

“They have a bright future and the main thing I would want to say to them is to just keep going.”