Real Kashmir Football Club review: Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Manav Kaul series scores on heart

But Real Kashmir Football Club takes its memo of being feel-good very seriously, so all the obstacles that Sohail and his compatriots, including their chief sponsor, Kashmiri Pandit liquor baron Shirish (Manav Kaul) face, are swept away summarily, so that the series can get to the job at hand: showing us how sports can save lives.

And in this, the show succeeds in spades. Over eight leisurely-constructed episodes, first two written by Dhruv Narang, we get glimpses of how fractured lives have been in this most beautiful of states– there’s a blink-and-miss scene of grizzled faces bent over their empty houseboats in the Dal– and how difficult it has been to gain a semblance of normalcy.

This is exactly what Sohail is after– the word ‘izzat’ comes up frequently, and it is a thing that, once earned, is true wealth– with which he goes as a supplicant not just to Shirish, but to the ‘best coach in all Kashmir’ Mustafa (Mu’Azzam Bhat), as well as the parents of the young men who are reluctant to let their sons get involved in a sporting activity which will ‘take them away from their studies.’

Winning over ‘the other side’ is done in a way we’ve seen in films set in Kashmir before. The unpeeling of young Amaan (Abhishant Rana) from the sticky diktats of hardline leader Nazir (Adhir Bhat) takes its time, as befits the connections built with jobless youth. Amaan plays a double game as long as he can, and then comes out, when the time is ripe, on the side of those who can give him a paying job and that elusive ‘izzat’.

The wooing of local star Azlan (Anmol Dhillon Thakeria) and Scottish coach Douglas (Mark Bennington, working away on that accent) which leads to tension with Mustafa, adds a layer to the plot, both reluctant entrants, and both won over by the joint efforts of Sohail and Shirish, the Hindu-Muslim pair, fashioned on real-life partnership of Sandip Chattoo and Shamim Meraj, who founded the real-life Real Kashmir Club.

As the never-say-die character even if you-have-to-lie, or embroider the truth, just to get everything going, Ayyub is terrific, keeping his ‘boys’ in check when they stray, never taking his eye off his goal. So is Kaul, whom we saw in the recent Kashmir based film Baramulla, who moves from being the ‘token Pandit’ to a fleshed-out, convincing character. What is striking is there’s nothing loud or unnecessarily rah-rah in the way things proceed: being determinedly low-key is much more impactful.

There are flashes where we see writers Simaab Hashmi, Danish Renzu and Umang Vyas plump for papering-over-the-cracks rather than the spikiness that can accompany the on-ground bitterness which has seeped into the valley’s fabric: scenes of security forces misbehaving, and barbed-wire on the streets flash by, but a solution is offered quickly.

And none of this takes away from the fact that this is a sporting drama holding out hope and healing that we need at this moment. If it could happen in 2016, perhaps it can happen again.

Real Kashmir Football Club cast: Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Manav Kaul
Real Kashmir Football Club directors: Mahesh Mathai, Rajesh Mapuskar
Real Kashmir Football Club rating: Three stars