The Grass Ceiling

But this is, above all, a story about Asians playing football. And not being accepted into the mainstream. It’s an age-old debate: Why can’t Asians cut it in professional football in England? Especially when they are increasingly a part of the cricket establishment (it helps, though, that cricket’s appeal among whites is steadily diminishing).

It’s a problem that cuts across gender barriers. Ironically, Asian women have been more successful than the men. The story of Jesminder Bhamra, heroine of Bend It…, is roughly the story of Aman Dosanj: Two seasons with Arsenal Ladies, one with Southampton and Dosanj is now at Lee University in the US, studying physical education and business.

She never did play for Manchester United but she did one better: In 1998, aged 14, she became the first Asian to play for England when she kept goal in an Under-16 match at Dublin (and kept a clean sheet).

In their book Corner Flags and Corner Shops: The Asian Football Experience, Jas Bains and Sanjiev Johal ask why India and Pakistan have never qualified for the World Cup. The answer: Whenever they get a corner, they build a shop on it. Behind the joke, though, as they explain, is the very real truth that, for much of the past three decades, football-shootball simply didn’t rate high on the community’s list of priorities.

Struggling to make a name for itself, often against the most vicious Powellite racism, the community needed all hands on deck; football wasn’t an option. Nice girls stayed at home and got married; nice boys took over the family business (witness Om Puri’s family in East is East).

Once the community’s reputation was established, however, in every field from politics to pop music, the reins were relaxed just a bit. Young people could dream of kicking around at some place bigger than the local community park.

That, though, was when they discovered that there was a grass ceiling they had to struggle to break through. Years earlier, the same limits had been imposed on immigrants from East Africa who wanted to play cricket, as Anupam Kher recounts in Bend It…. Cricket opened its doors to welcome Asians only when ethnic English youth stopped looking at the game as a career option.

Naturally, the same conditions didn’t, and still don’t, exist in the case of football: It’s the national game (for women, too: the sport has just overtaken netball as the most popular female sport in England) and competition for any slice of the pie, however minuscule, is tough.

Asians had to first get over the disadvantage of physique; they didn’t reap the benefits of a beef-eating, beer-guzzling lifestyle. That’s a harsh judgement, though, one which discounts the success of small men (e.g. George Best, Paul Scholes and Juninho) in top-flight English football.

More importantly, they had to dismantle the inbred conviction among the English that Asians didn’t play football (a motif that recurs through this book and the film).

Happily, the number of those who have succeeded on both counts is rising. Newcastle’s Michael Chopra followed Dosanj into the England squad at various levels; Harpal Singh plays for Leeds; Amrit Sidhu for Derby County. Women, too, who drew inspiration from American woman stars Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain: Amy Sudan could be the next Dosanj, and Permi Jhooti has won several top honours with Fulham Ladies, one of the top two teams.

It’s still very much the tip of the iceberg, though; for every Jess, or Dosanj, or even Harpal Singh, there are youngsters struggling to break out of the stereotype, who don’t want to cook alu-gobi or run the cornershop, who want to make the most of their potential.

And it happens in India, too.