During the summer of 1986,like the rest of the country,our smallish town situated not too far from Gujarats Arabian coast got bitten by the football bug. It was the first ever non-cricketing sporting indulgence for a place famous for the calculative moves of their traders and the nifty skills of their stock brokers and not known to produce a creative ball-player or a striker with a sublime step-over.
Doordarshan was getting the FIFA World Cup at Mexico to our living rooms and that resulted in a few long-deprived fans and several outrightly uninitiated freshers sitting together in a hypnotic stupor watching the first-ever top quality extended football feast in India. Every night brought a new hero from games where men kept running for close to 90 minutes but never got tired,never missed a pass and never lost control over the ball. Paucity of television sets translated into large groups in small rooms. And as is the case with all clusters on the sidelines of sporting events,factions with their own favourites started taking root.
Watching the neutral make their choices while bonding with alien teams was funnily fascinating. A semi-literate family which owned a footwear kiosk in the local market soon became famous as German loyalists. Their surprising allegiance to arguably one of the most boring teams of the tournament was because of the teams goalkeeper Harald Schumacher. Early in the tournament,the family patriarch,a one-time cobbler,looking at the team list had spotted the name Schumacher and made a grand announcement: We will support Germany. The goalkeeper like us makes shoes.
An Indrajal comics addict friend took to Germany for a different reason. Mandrakes sidekick Lothar was his hero and thus his bonding with the German captain. Our neighbour Mr Joshis whacky son made a few corrections to his homes name plate the day Brazilian Josimar scored a stunning 30 yard goal against Northern Ireland. He knocked off the h and added mar and that spelled out the Joshis life-long bonding with Brazil. In a sudden moment of clarity,the milkman pledged support to Denmark. Canadas easy immigrations laws made it a popular team in the region that collectively dreams about green cards.
Easy-on-the-eyes players like the tall bearded Socrates and the one without the tucked shirt Platini were instant hits and so were those with easy-on-the-tongue names like Zico and Bats. All four were involved in the match of the tournament that Brazil lost to France. In case one went around with a difficult to pronounce name like Butragueno,he needed to score four goals in a game to find a mention in half-time discussions over tea. But during that memorable summer of 1986,everything changed when Maradona scored the goal of the century against England. Everything else was secondary after that.
Its a been a long time since then. Maradona,after several visits to rehab,weight loss surgery is now Argentinas coach. In India football awareness has increased manifold since 1986. So much so that some debate competitions in colleges these days have topics like Is the English Premier League a threat to cricket in India? Enough is written about the popularity of European clubs (in case you are in a metro,just glance out of the window and you will see a teenager in a fake English or Spanish club jersey). The fans might have come a long way but sadly the football hasnt. It seems that India was so awed by the 86 experience that it decided to sit on the sidelines and clap rather than step on the field and kick ball.
But still every four years we ask the question: will we ever see an Indian football team at the World Cup? And the answer remains the same: well,not before the ice sprouts grass in Antarctica.
The mystery continues,as in Olympics,of a country of 1.1 billion,or nearly one-fifth of the world population,failing to produce a footballer of note. To make things worse,in contrast other minnow nations have thrived. Look at the qualifying list and imagine North Korea!
Why cricket and not football (despite its English tradition) took root more deeply in India defies the logic of colonial history as seen elsewhere. Are we more inclined to the laid-back nature of cricket and lack the instant and spontaneous energy that has made football universal? It is a known fact that athleticism has not been our forte. But nimble footed and graceful players have blessed our other big team sport,hockey,sadly again on the downward spiral. And if poverty has done wonders to Brazil and African nations,we have had that in plenty.
At a stage when sporting rivalries between the big three Kolkata clubs or Santosh Trophy hardly makes news anymore,football in India is at a crossroads one that makes its future ever more urgent. If the past is of no use,the cue must come from what we as a nation have done well in the recent past,and that has not come from sports,despite a Viswanathan Anand,M. S. Dhoni and Vijender Singh.
We have become known globally because of our tech generation. They have in a single step done what political parties or the stock markets failed to do a collective leap of imagination,urbane in nature and democratic in essence. Individual enterprise,not banking on government grants and the will to be world leaders are some lessons soccer can learn from the IT sector. The desire to take destiny in our own hands has been the moral of various silicon Valley success stories. And thats something common to Brazilian World Cupper Grafites journey from selling thrash bags to wearing wearing the yellow and green jersey. But for that happen there are mountains to climb. Heres hoping and praying that our younger generation is watching the World Cup and it gives flight to their iPhone-tickled imagination.
sandeep.dwivedi@expressindia.com
