Indian football, where art thou?

Off the Gulf of Cambay in 1721 inside the flourishing port town that is its eponym, Lieutenant Clement Downing of an East India Company fleet first played the game of cricket on Indian soil. Played by sailors and watched by coolies, the sport acted as a good distraction from the routine slow-moving lives of both the English and the Indians who mostly had to wait on end for ships.

167 years later and 1,400 km away in British India’s winter capital of Simla, a man by the name of Mortimer Durand started what would become the world’s third oldest football competition – the Durand Cup. Football became quite popular in the decades after that – a particular turning point many believe to be India’s oldest current club Mohun Bagan Sporting Club beating East Yorkshire Regiment in the final of the IFA Shield in 1911, and it was named India’s national sport for a while. But owing to the nature of cricket – the leisurely pace of the game and the connotations of it being a gentleman's game attracted more Indians because of our ever-growing desire to emulate the West. These though, weren’t the only elements tipping the scale. India, being a tropical country has starkly different conditions to England. This meant that football – which required great stamina and the ol’ ways of English football which promoted strength over everything, proved a big disadvantage in a country with eight months of summer and a vastly non-meat-eating population.

Teams in action at St. Joseph's, Colaba.

Hence, despite the Golden Era of Indian Football from 1951-62 pioneered by the legendary Syed Abdul Rahim, his death in the 60s ticked off India’s fall from the pecking order in Asia and coupled with the World Cup success in cricket in 1983, it triggered a new wave of youth that wanted to be part of this Western gentlemen game and make it their own. Seeing the massive numbers wanting to get into the sport, investors threw open cricketing academies in a bid to train this uncultured youth with huge amounts of passion but nay a single drop of tactical training.

For sports – be it cricket or football, is easy to love and seems simple to understand on the surface, but at the professional level the demands transcend into much more than just scoring runs and goals. This today, is where we are with football. In Colaba’s St. Joseph High School on the muddy grounds that these locals call the field, a bunch of passionate youth run amok with the simplistic aim of getting that black-and-white-hexagonally-patched ball into the opposition’s goal, where the dedicated keepers conjure acts of diving bravery without concern for the gooey mud that’s about to splash their clothes, body and face. As I sit beside a guy named Irfan wearing a Manchester United jersey which proclaims his name and the number 10, and question him on the events, he responds in a very friendly manner and says, “Everyone here works for six days a week. Sunday is the only day all of us can come together and do what we love most – play football.” The love for the game is clearly evident – but the Indian audience isn’t bothered to support the sport. Clearly we are too well busy with cricket – the BCCI is one of the richest, if not the richest cricketing body currently and this then coupled with the aforementioned reason creates a vicious cycle. In a country where cricket offers such riches, it’d be considered foolish and hence is acceptable when cricketers like Sourav Ganguly and Mahendra Singh Dhoni confess they were better at football since their sporting beginnings but opted for a money-minded decision.

A goalkeeper attempts to save a penalty at St. Joseph's, Colaba.

Without the cash investment then, this local tournament in Colaba not only lacks exposure but is also devoid of any official status. The only audience that views these matches every Sunday are the teams waiting to play next. But sponsors isn’t the panacea by any stretch – these players with their kind of love for the game need to involve their immediate family and friends if they indeed hope for a better future. Also, another highly important aspect is the creation of a local football association that will not only cater to their own needs but also be able to hand-out official status to a tournament that not seems self-organised, but self-styled too. The format, though simple – all teams are composed of players from smaller regions in Colaba – Army Area, Navy Nagar, Nofra and Railway Colony to name a few, but team selection is arbitrary in nature – interested friends come together to play and thus it isn’t necessarily the best the area has to offer. This is where a local FA comes in – by granting official status, attracting local companies to sponsor and hence an appropriate prize money, such an association will then be able to demarcate not only the various sub-divisions of the locality but also be able to conduct a proper selection process of not just players, but even coaches. This is exactly the reason for success in England’s ten-level league structure — devotion to the sport by players, regional level investors – owners and promoters alike and most importantly, the fans. The lattermost reason is why even clubs at third and fourth levels of the pyramid boast average audience of 4,400 to 6,000.

As with most cases on our planet, it is only the voices of the few privileged ones that is heard and causes change. The urban upper middle class needs to divert some of its fascination with the European side of the game to local pastures, if they want to contribute to Indian football in more than just a few lines of criticism. It won’t be an easy task and not a single thing will change overnight, but it’ll do much good than what everyone including the players at Colaba’s St. Joseph do past the 5-pm-play-deadline – join Sunday Mass in prayer.