Stuff I wrote for my college campus newspaper - 23

Football in India - 1

By Sanket kambli

This article is first in the series about the situation of Football in India.

This article, doesn’t aim to be an analytical report on Football in India, but is only reaction of a young football fan on the situation here, as his eyes see and ears hear.

Cricket in India is always in season, there is never a time when cricket is not played here. But monsoon makes it virtually impossible for wannabe tendulkars and pathans to play cricket, this is when a ball is kicked around, football is the one of the few and most popular games which can be played without any problems during showers. So as dark clouds start gathering, wannabe beckham’s and zidane’s start inflating their footballs from a local air pumping station and look around for an empty ground , more the slush the better, slush filled grounds are preferred to any other surface as one can try out histrionics like sliding tackle, heading a ball into the net ,without any serious injuries. The fun is totally beyond the understanding of people who have never played football in a muddy ground with rain crashing on them. It brings you a sensation which puts you on ‘cloud number nine’. But what bothers me is that, many a times this is how our national team trains for big events. Well, our team training is not completely a mud and rain affair but the quality of training is not really at par even with hockey. And this surely explains our ranking in world football, I am not expecting my country to be next to Brazil in the list, but I expect my country to rank beside Asian power houses like Japan, Korea, and China. Is it asking too much? Now that I have mentioned all this, it may seem logical for me to enlist ways in which football can be developed here. But isn’t that something everyone in the media has been doing for many years, even before my birth. So what exactly are we supposed to do, wait for FIFA to ban us, as already AFC has served us notice for not developing football in the right manner? And see our lone star striker Bhichung Bhutia carry out after match analysis on ESPN or what?