“I have not posted for a while but I have an excellent excuse of not blogging. I wrote my final exams last month and like every other engineering student worth his sodium chloride, I started getting hang of things at the last moment. I have this feeling and million other empathize that last minute studies are actually an aid to memory. Difficult units of syllabi can be solved in hours if studied days before exam. No intricate complexities, minimum input maximum output, no technical jargon and all this makes me a half baked B.E next month. I head to find my next goal in life. Hope floats - I will post regularly from now. “
A small country like Ghana is doing so well in the World Cup. The debutants qualified from their group beating the Czech and USA. For a country which geographically speaking will be no more than one fourth of Uttar Pradesh its a giant leap. Kofi Annan, The UN Secretary General also a Ghanaian lauded the success. He attributes this to the hard work of players and the talent spotting programme being run in their football fraternity. The other country which also featured this year was Trinidad and Tobago. Pintsized T&T lies next to cricket crazy West Indies and it’s just a blip in the map. As an Indian I want India to take part in the World Cup but really how bleak is our future.
It’s a bit of a wake up call for India whose ranked 117th in the World FIFA ranking. We don’t have to look far for inspiration in order to improve. A decade ago Japan and Korea were at par with us in global soccer ranking. It’s only because of long term training and professionalism that Japan did so well and is now the Asian football powerhouse. Every time I look at the blonde haired Jap’s play I scream “hey that could’ve been an Indian player”. (Of course, minus the double somersault and the exultation).
Now historically India can’t do what these Jap’s have done that is to overhaul the domestic league, providing professional coaching and giving generous dole to grass root football. Be it any sport, India is by nature an unsporting country. Even if your parent’s allow you to play, you suffer at the hands of government’s fiefdom. This is the reason why we have Baichung Bhutia and I.M Vijayan, two footballer of notable quality from the past decade. Baichung even played for FC Bury which is not the most celebrated football club. But in the more advanced foreign clubs being and even in a mediocre place like Bury FC, something special is needed to really stand out. Nothing less than a top-notch athlete can survive an English season.
In the glorious past of Indian football that is in the 60’s and 70’s Chuni Goswami and Subhash Bhowmick had some lucrative offers from European clubs , but they could not overcome the middle class “need’ for job security and preferred playing for Air India, Mohan Bagan, Railways….etcetc. Footballers like Khalid Jamil, Renedy Singh, Bijen Singh and Gautam Ghosh could never rise above their semi-amateur status. We can sit at home feeling the buzz in Germany and similarly feeling the stark mediocrity of Indian football. So we stick to comfy sports like CRICKET.
