Brazil8217;s soccer overcomes corruption bad infrastructure. Perfect country to help India
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You could almost hear the collective sigh of approval from Kolkata8217;s Maidan and Goa8217;s village grounds: after years of back-passes, miskicks and professional fouls, Indian football is finally gearing up for a shot at goal. The Indian government has signed an MOU with Brazil for the world8217;s best-known football nation to train our coaches and players. So after the Iron Curtain failed spectacularly in providing steel to our teams, and the best efforts of two Englishmen flickered under the midday sun of corruption, lethargy and red-tape, in come the boys from Brazil, for whom standard Indian malpractices will be passeacute;.
The wondrous thing about Brazilian football is not that it is so very good but that it thrives despite being run by a bunch of people whose appetite for sleaze would make our cow-belt politicians look like choirboys. The coaches would be equally inured to the social problems given what they face at home: match-fixing, rotten infrastructure literally so, in the case of stadiums, dirt-poor slums providing cheap labour to the West. Out of all this come Ronaldinho and his band of brothers.
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Happily, the blueprint drawn up by Professor Manoel Espezim Neto, the head of the Brazilian Football Academy, looks not merely at the next match or tournament or even the next four years; it looks at a 25-year programme, working on players from pre-teen to the finished article. That8217;s a refreshing change from the typical vision of Indian football, either myopic or as bent as a Beckham free-kick; the peripheral vision coaches try and inculcate in their wards is conspicuously absent among administrators. Nor is patience their strongest suit; in this case, they must resist reaching for the red card too soon. Meanwhile, full credit to Dr Singh who, like Neto, is possibly thinking long-term: his nimble footwork, he believes, could fetch the Congress huge dividends the next time West Bengal goes to the polls. There8217;s one flaw in that strategy: half of Kolkata supports Argentina!
