|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
The National, 21 February 2009
Gethin Chamberlain SKIPPING past his marker and making for the byline, Sunil Chhetri looked up and squared the ball into the penalty area. It was the 75th minute of the final of the AFC Challenge Cup and India were already two goals to the good. Chhetri, though, had an appetite for more. Continuing his run, he nudged the ball away from the fumbling hands of the Tajik goalkeeper, pulled back his right foot and lashed the ball past two defenders into the bottom right corner of the net. For Chhetri, it was a well-deserved hat-trick. But as the young striker wheeled away to celebrate and the 10,000-strong crowd in Delhi’s Ambedkar Stadium went wild, something else was happening. Indian football was taking its first tentative steps towards respectability after languishing for decades in the doldrums. Victory in the Challenge Cup on August 13 last year meant automatic qualification for the finals of the next Asian Cup in 2011. The last time India featured in the competition, in 1984, they were knocked out in the first round. The next big test of how far Indian football has come arrives on Feb 25, when I-League champions Dempo take on Al Sharjah of the UAE in a one-off qualifier for the Asian Champions League. But the size of the crowd which cheered on the national side in Delhi last August says much about just how far Indian football has to travel. In a nation of one billion people, cricket remains king and it is telling that the young I-League comands so little international respect that its champion must enter a winner-takes-all playoff against a side that finished fourth in the old UAE League last season. The Indian national football team languishes at 148 in the latest Fifa rankings – below the south pacific island of Vanuatu, the Cape Verde Islands and Swaziland. The one crumb of comfort they have is that they do at least remain ahead of arch rivals Pakistan, whose perfomances make even India look good. If there was ever a golden era of Indian football, it was the 1950s and 60s, when the national side picked up a couple of Asian Games gold medals and secured a runner’s up slot in the Asian Cup. After that, it was downhill all the way. The last time India even got near the World Cup was in 1950 when, the story goes, the team declined to take part because a number of players prefered to play barefoot, and Fifa rules demanded boots. Since then, the Indian team has never got past the early qualifying stages. Last year they crashed out 6-3 on aggregate to Lebanon in the first qualifying round for South Africa in 2010. Yet amid the gloom, there are faint glimmers of hope. After all, it is not as if the Indian public treats football with the same sort of indifference that is displayed in the USA; indeed, many Indians are obsessed with the English Premier League and will happily expound at length on the respective merits of Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester United. Now the footballing world with India is beginning to pay attention to what is happening on the sub-continent. The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) was keen enough to encourage Indian football that it found a place for Dempo in the qualifying rounds of the Champions League ahead of stronger claims from other leagues. Britain’s cash-rich Premier League teams are also hovering. Manchester United and Chelsea have shown an interest in tapping into the vast potential of the Indian market and both United and Everton have run coaching schemes in the country. Representatives from United visited India recently to talk with the All India Football Federation (AIFF) about developing the sport at grassroots level. Among those who see light at the end of the tunnel is the Indian team’s captain and star striker, Bhaichung Bhutia, who became only the second Indian player to play in a foreign league when he joined Bury in 1999. (The first was Mohammad Salim, who played for Celtic in 1936). Bhutia spent three years with the English club and did a further three month stint on loan with Malaysia’s Perak in 2006. He believes Indian players will benefit from a change in the AFC rules this season to permit teams to field three foreign players (including one from Asia), with Indian players able to improve their skills at clubs outside the country. “I think there’s a big interest in the players to go abroad,” he said. “They need to start producing results in the international tournaments, then people will start to look at them. But if the national team doesn’t make a big impact in Asia you can’t expect to be noticed outside.” For Bhutia, India’s success in the AFC Challenge Cup represents at least a basis for progress. “I think it is very important for any country to qualify for the Asian Cup. It is not easy and it is a very good step forward,” he said. “We are still in the development process and in the last two or three years we have been able to concentrate more on overseas tournaments. We were really focussed on this tournament and we have got the right preparation.” But to go further, he argues, Indian football needs to address the issues that have held it back for so long. “Infrastructure has been a real failure. We just don’t have enough playing grounds. There are not enough open areas for kids to go to play. “I don’t think you can force children to play football and the majority will play cricket, but the ones who want to play football need to be given the space and opportunities.” What Indian football really needs, he believes, are more good coaches, a view clearly shared by his national coach, Bob Houghton, who called the country’s club coaches together for a national camp in Goa last month. Next time they meet up, he says, he wants an overseas coach there to freshen up their ideas. There is no doubt that India have improved since Houghton, 61, took over in 2006. The former Fulham player has managed around the world in a career which has seen him take Malmo to the European Cup final (where they lost to Nottingham Forest) and spend spells in charge of the Chinese and Uzbek national sides as well as a host of clubs in England, Saudi Arabia, the US and China. What he would like now is as much time as possible with his Indian internationals to prepare them for the 2011 Asian Cup, though he admits it is hard to see where that time will come from amid the competing demands of their various league and cup commitments. “What’s really required now is the victory [in the Challenge Cup] to act as further incentive for the players to work hard and get fitter to be better players and for the players coming behind to recognise it,” he said. Go to the Asian Cup and perform poorly and India will be back to square one, he says. What they need to do is to prepare properly and give a good account of themselves against the best teams in Asia. “If we do then it will do two things,” he said. “One, it will raise the portfolio of the game and secondly it will give us some belief that somewhere down the line we can qualify for the World Cup. “If Indian football has to make that great stride forward then we really need the I-League to be the engine for that move,” he said. Others think those who run the Indian game might do better to take a look at themselves. Football in India comes under the control of the All India Football Federation, a committee-based organisation funded by Fifa. It, however, has problems of its own, with its president, Priya Ranjan DasMunshi, currently sick and confined to hospital. While Houghton only alludes to the need for state associations to be “accommodative”, Arunava Chaudhuri, editor in chief of the influential sports website Indian Football.Com, says the administration of the sport needs an overhaul. “The biggest hurdle is not having a development system,” he said. “The national federation has improved but in in size and strength they are just too small. The state federations need to be professional. At the moment they are run by people in honorary positions running them in their spare time.” Chaudhuri’s company does not simply report on Indian football: it has taken an active role in developing the sport, organising training camps for Indian footballers in Germany and arranging a memorandum of understanding between the AIFF and the German Bundesliga. “The sport has had a good couple of years where some things have gone right,” added Chaudhari. “But there is sometimes a cycle where things seem to be going up and there needs to be a lot of effort put in. The AFC thinks Indian football is a sleeping giant, but Indian football in a lot of places is not taken seriously. It is such a big country with such potential, but the results are something else. “It would be great for Dempo to qualify, but it is one leg in Sharjah and it is going to be difficult.” Two years ago Fifa launched the Win in India with India scheme to develop Indian football at an elite level, focusing on the development of infrastructure and support for management and club licensing. When Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, visited India in 2007 he likened the country to the USA, where football was also not the number one sport. India, he said, had lost its way; what he wanted to do, he said, was to “wake up the sleeping giant”. What India could really do with right now is its own superstar, a David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo. Those holding out for a hero might might take heart from the emergence of one Raja Chinnaswamy, a young striker already on the fringes of the national side, with a backstory so extraordinary it would be worthy of a Bollywood movie. His mother murdered, his father reduced to ruin by illness, the young Raja found himself, at the age of six, begging on the streets of the southern Indian state of Kerala. All seemed lost when he fell into the clutches of the begging mafia, who tortured him for failing to bring in enough money, burning him with iron rods and threatening to kill him. But a chance meeting with a kind-hearted bookseller turned his life around. The bookseller knew a man who ran a children’s home; it was Raja’s good fortune that he also had a passion for sport. It was not long before Raja’s natural footballing talents as a right winger were spotted by a couple of former Indian footballing internationals roped in by the home to lend a hand with the coaching. “He is a very speedy player with the ball and a very good goal getter. He thinks about positioning and he is always watching the other players,” says Soly Xavier, who played right back for the national side from 1986 to 1989. “Whenever he gets an opportunity he scores a goal. Within a year and a half he will be in the national side.” Every morning, Raja and the other boys rise at 5.30am and head for the football pitch. They get in an hour’s practice before lessons, then change quickly and head back onto the pitch to practice some more. “These boys come from destitution, but they play with enthusiasm,” Xavier says. “That is what gives them their edge. They want to become something so they are giving their best efforts. They are playing without fear.” Last September, Raja was selected for the state football team. “I was happy and crying” he said. “Many of the players were crying because they had not been selected but I was crying because I had been.” Trials for the national side beckon. Neither Raja nor his coaches doubt that he will make it. “I will definitely play for India. I can do it,” he says. Raja’s break came from a stroke of good fortune; there must be others out there with similiar talents just waiting to be discovered. What Indian football needs to do now is to find a way of unearthing them, giving them the coaching they need and the facilities to hone their skills. A win for Dempo on Wednesday may be the break Indian football needs. The more success India has, the higher will be the profile of the sport and the more international interest there will be in its players.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
|
Related links
|
|
-