Abdul Majeed Kakroo: The story of football in Jammu and Kashmir
Abdul Majeed Kakroo has had a disproportionate impact on local football. In fact, his is the story of the sport in the Valley.
Abdul Majeed Kakroo remembers walking home at a furious pace, slamming open the door, picking up a couple of medals and walking straight out, without mentioning a word to his startled wife. It was a pleasant spring day in 2007. And Kakroo was enraged.
Word had gotten out that the then chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Azad, wanted to convert the TRC Ground into a tulip garden. Kakroo didn’t mind the tulips, but was sure the move would’ve brought an end to football in Srinagar. “A few decades ago, there were around 25-26 grounds in Srinagar. But one by one, all those grounds were encroached upon and now they’ve constructed buildings on them. TRC was one of the few grounds left, there was no way I could’ve seen a tulip garden developed there,” he says.
So Kakroo, the first player from Kashmir to captain India, took it upon himself to protect the stadium. “I had two South Asian Games gold medals, and I said I will burn myself outside the secretariat,” he says, sounding agitated even as he recalls the episode. A few other notable sporting names from Kashmir joined him in the protest, and Azad eventually had to relent.
On Tuesday, the first-ever I-League match in the Valley, between Real Kashmir and Churchill Brothers, will be played on that very ground. Kakroo might have stopped playing more than 25 years ago. But he continues to stamp his authority on the state’s footballing landscape even today.
“Majeed bhai hai toh Kashmir mein football hai,” says Mohammad Yousuf, the coach of a local team. Around here, Kakroo is more than just a footballer. Everyone has a Majeed bhai story. But Majeed bhai is quite a storyteller himself.
Kakroo played football in more than a dozen Indian cities, in front of thousands of fans. But it’s the games he played post midnight at Lal Chowk, the Srinagar city centre, which he remembers most vividly. This is back in the 1970s, when around 25 men used to converge on a tiny square between the Palladium Cinema and the Clock Tower. “That was the only spot in the entire city which had streetlights. So after the 12 o’clock show ended, our show used to begin,” he says.
The skills he honed as a street footballer took him to places he could never imagine. In the second half of the ’70s — 1977 to be exact — the Road Transport Corporation (RTC) team offered Kakroo his first professional contract — with a salary of Rs 180 per month. RTC was one of several government units big on football. And for a son of a vegetable vendor who’d started playing the sport using crumpled paper as a ball, this was a princely sum. But it was just the beginning.
Teams from Kashmir, in the late 70s, were known for the individual brilliance of a few players. But collectively, they rarely posed a threat. “At the Durand Cup, we were known as the savere-waali-gaadi-se-chale-jaane-waali team (a team that’ll take the morning train back) since we’d travel all the way to Delhi, lose the first match and return,” he laughs.
That reputation would change in 1980. Kakroo’s team RTC, playing its first Durand Cup, reached the quarterfinals, where they lost to JCT. “Pehli dafa tehelka macha dia (We created a stir in our first appearance). I ended up scoring 18 goals in that edition,” he says.
Kakroo had drawn the attention of the national team scouts and GMH Basha, the then India coach, summoned him for a national camp in Bangalore. Kakroo packed a few belongings and took a bus from Srinagar to Jammu first. He then embarked on another long bus journey to Delhi, from where he boarded the train to Bangalore. It took five days for him to reach the southern city.
But the long journey proved futile. Kakroo wasn’t selected for the national team. “Left paanv banaa aur phir aa (improve your left foot and then come back to me),” the coach told me.
At first, Kakroo didn’t quite understand what Basha meant. There weren’t any qualified coaches in Kashmir who could decode those words for him, either. But he realised the flaw in his game. “So during training, I started to wear a stocking over my right football shoe and then put a sharp stone inside it. If the ball touched it, my toes would pain unbearably. That way, I forced myself to control and kick the ball using only my left foot,” Kakroo says. “I did that for several months and left paanv banaya.”
At the Rovers Cup the following year, Kakroo says he scored 26 goals. The clamour to include him in the national team grew, but the team management chose Biswajit Bhattacharya ahead of him. Kakroo is dismissive of the Kolkata striker. “Woh hero jaisa dikhta tha. So they took him, and I returned to Srinagar..
Abdul Majeed Kakroo: The story of football in Jammu and Kashmir
Abdul Majeed Kakroo has had a disproportionate impact on local football. In fact, his is the story of the sport in the Valley.
But when he scored back-to-back hat-tricks in the Santosh Trophy in Thrissur that year, they couldn’t ignore him anymore. For the next eight years, Kakroo remained a constant in the Indian team and even captained the side. He went on to become one of the highest-paid footballers in the country after Mohun Bagan offered him Rs 60,000 per month.
“My first salary was Rs 180.” he smiles. “Subrata Bhattacharya (former Bagan defender) told club officials one day, bokac***da, isko Kashmir se laaya aur 60,000 deta hai aur mujhe 45,000. He even accused me of ‘buying’ one section of the crowd to cheer me during matches! For more than one year in Kolkata, I didn’t have to pay for a cup of tea. I even saw all movies for free!”
Those were heady days for Kakroo and, in turn, for football in Kashmir. But all that would change in 1989.
Majeed Yousuf, who played for the state youth teams and is now a football administrator, remembers the early days of the Kashmir conflict in a different way than others. “I was returning from a tournament in Sonepat and on the way back, when we entered Srinagar, the streets were completely deserted. I could only see men in uniform,” he says.
Later that evening, he heard that Kakroo was detained by the forces. “And I thought, if they can do that to him, then it could happen to anyone,” Yousuf says.
Kakroo recalls the incident. “I was walking to the training ground and two vans zoomed in. One stopped in front, another behind me. They thought they had arrested some big terrorist. Eventually, they checked my ID card and let me go.”
Another time, they barged into his house in the middle of the day during a crackdown and, along with a few other men from the neighbourhood, herded him to a nearby ground where he was made to sit on his knees while the forces searched his house. “All they could find was some footballs, jerseys and medals. It kept on happening. It hurt. I’d played in every corner of the country and in 25 countries. It was humiliating.”
Kakroo cut short his playing career and returned to Srinagar to be with his family during those volatile times. From 1989 to 1996, football came to a complete standstill. But still, there was hope. Whenever curfew was lifted, even if it was for an hour, the youth invested that time in playing football, Yousuf says. As life limped back to a semblance of normalcy, football once again became a priority. And Kakroo was in the forefront of it. He began coaching local teams, where he spotted Mehrajuddin Wadoo — who went on to play several matches for the national team.
“Still, we lost an entire generation of players. This was one of the major reasons why sport collapsed in this region. If you played at TRC or Polo Ground, there was a risk that you could be arrested. These venues were out of bound for us,” he says.
Kakroo had seen how football had died when the TRC Ground was snatched away from them. So when Azad chose that as the location for a tulip garden, one can understand why he was enraged. “I had to protest, and I wasn’t alone. The entire football fraternity was with me,” he says.
The garden, named after Indira Gandhi, was then made on an open space near Dal Lake. It’s the biggest of its kind in Asia and was opened for visitors last year. On Tuesday, a refurbished TRC Ground will witness a landmark moment of its own. And to the relief of many here, especially Kakroo, it’ll be about football.
The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) have announced the groups for the 2020 AFC U-23 Championship qualifiers. India have been put in Group F, along with Uzbekistan (the hosts of the group), Tajikistan and arch-rivals Pakistan. The tournament serves as the qualifiers for the 2020 AFC U-23 Championship to be played in Thailand. The qualifiers will be played between 22-26 March 2019.
Indian football’s slide started midway through the 1970s, never to be arrested, after all... The country’s major clubs are just as responsible for its football gloom as its national federation because finding and grooming talent — FIFA and its loyalists call it youth development — is alien to their nature.
When Michael Jackson moonwalked, his fans simply went wild. But try coaxing and cajoling someone into going down Indian football’s memory lane and chances are you will have even the die-hard buff of the game rolling his eyes, consulting his wristwatch and remembering an important appointment a mile and a half away. That is not because you or I can’t sing like Jackson, but due in a large measure to the general impression that it is where history keeps repeating itself, tragedy having long been indistinguishable from farce.
The slide started midway through the 1970s, never to be arrested, after all. And as one started looking up one’s old, dog-eared notepads for this 40-year retrospective view, the boom of the voice in New Delhi that barred India from the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia — saying, in so many words, that the Indian Olympic Association preferred medal prospects to also-rans — came through clearly wherever you were.
It was World Cup time and no one had any use for something that had mostly been dismissed as a dog’s dinner. Or rather, the leftover of it. Indian football modestly pointed at a rise in its global ranking, its victory in the self-conducted Intercontinental Cup and its Asian Cup qualifying success. But you can’t fool all people for all time.
FIFA’s scheme of things being what it is, ratings rise if you keep playing muppets and winning, which explained both the trophy triumph and the ascent to the Asian Cup finals. What the national federation hid from us was that India had once played an Asian Cup final (1964). The IOA’s rejection of the All-India Football Federation’s Asian Games request, even though the AIFF was game for picking up the tab, was a throwback to the event’s Hiroshima edition (1994) when football was similarly tackled.
But the 2018 snub drives home the fact that the AIFF chose not to learn its lesson and copped a repeat insult which essentially made it clear that the structural tinkering it had resorted to — the National League (1996) which later became the I-League, the Indian Super League (since 2014) imposed by its marketing whizkids — in the period being reviewed was so much sawdust.
None of it went even halfway towards altering the truth that, after more than a century of playing the game, having been the first Asian country to make an Olympic football semi-final (1956), won two Asian Games gold medals (1951, 1962), we got nowhere near the World Cup since the AIFF began centralising its tournament organisation. Truth to tell, what became increasingly, and alarmingly, clear was that it wasn’t even interested in building on the successes it had achieved in the past even though the competitive field was getting wider and proportionately tougher as West Asians, Central Asians and, later, Australia too got in.
The Federation Cup kicked off in 1977 and the other competitions followed, complete with sponsorship and television coverage, and the AIFF maintained the expressionless calm of a pin cushion as the most important contests in the land grew alarmingly anaemic. Ruin followed. When was the last time you — or Mumbai — heard of the Rovers Cup being held?
Given that the Indian Army is committed to carrying on with the Durand Cup, it only limps on. New Delhi hasn’t seen a final of it at its Ambedkar Stadium for some time. It has a peripatetic existence now, like a travelling circus. Going by some reports, its forthcoming edition could be held in Kolkata. But in that eastern Indian metropolis, its own Indian Football Association Shield, where all major teams wanted to do their best at one time, is edged out of the bigtime calendar by the big-noise shows of the national federation now. It trudges on as an under-18 tournament, largely ignored even by the local press, which is aware of the age-faking that goes self-defeatingly on.
More of that, later, but the point about the virtual withering away of India’s traditional football platforms, which supplied us with a plentitude of talent in happier days, is that it throws into sharp relief the vapid thinking behind the gigs thought up during the period we survey. When the National League kicked in even as the Federation Cup was showing signs of being fearful of the tackles put in by Time, it was part of the guff of Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, then AIFF chief, that we needed to modernise the game in this country. But he could raid only the public sector’s treasury, among whose custodians were people scared of his political or, worse, ministerial power.
Asked, by this correspondent, how he proposed to persuade corporate houses to part with their cash for Indian football, Dasmunsi, who was only nurturing yet another constituency in the time-worn and weather-beaten manner of a hard-boiled power-grabber unencumbered by scruples, once said: “The press is central to it because it can create an ambience of hope.” Shorthand for PR work, that. He knew he wouldn’t be spoken to again.
But if you care to look at the way things have unfolded, huge chunks of the corporate sector, put off by the way the AIFF has gone about its business, have simply left the field. Orkay, Mafatlal, Mahindra and Mahindra, JCT Mills: the list can be lengthened without substantive additions. Government entities like Food Corporation of India have lowered their own profiles.
Indian football’s slide started midway through the 1970s, never to be arrested, after all... The country’s major clubs are just as responsible for its football gloom as its national federation because finding and grooming talent — FIFA and its loyalists call it youth development — is alien to their nature.
The ISL was yet another ill-conceived project, with its qualitative appeal predicated on has-beens, regardless of how big they once were. In football, you lose a lot when you lose a yard of time-specific pace. We can’t afford the players China targets — and gets. AIFF vice-president Subrata Dutta was ecstatic before it started, speaking of being able to “sell” Indian football at long last. All insiders realise now that it’s not really a success story. When it comes to sport, people don’t come rushing in to pick up any junk laid attractively out.
But India’s major clubs are just as responsible for its football gloom as its national federation because finding and grooming talent — FIFA and its loyalists call it youth development — is alien to their nature. Matt Busby deemed it his primary job in Manchester United. We, surrounded and shepherded by smartypants, take the existence of talent in our teams, national, regional or whatever, for granted and proceed accordingly.
“Yes, that’s true,” says Arun Ghosh, 1962 gold winner who later coached India and was chief of the Tata Football Academy. “We’ve never had a scientific approach to scouting and training. Things are really bad today, because India let themselves down in the U-17 World Cup and unless we shift our attention from getting up blockbusters to working at the grassroots level, we’ll deteriorate progressively.”
That rampant age-faking, allegedly pioneered by Bengal in the 1970s and continuing to this day, in its quest for national-level glory, scuttles whatever is attempted in terms of learning and progressing is another area of darkness. Decades ago, Sailen Manna, a former Olympian who’s no more, told yours truly: “If you want to kill the game, let age-fakers loose.”
But Indian football lives. And it will do so because it gives us intermittent glimpses of excellence that impress everyone. In 2001, India edged 1-0 past the United Arab Emirates, coached by Henri Michel, in a World Cup qualifier. Bengaluru FC made the Asian Confederation Cup final in 2016; in 2008, Dempo Sports Club got as far as its semifinal, beating several West Asian teams on the way. East Bengal won the Asean Club Cup in 2003. Die-hard fans would also want India’s 2002 LG Cup victory in Vietnam, its runner-up finish in the one-off 2003 Afro-Asian Games, its 2008 AFC Challenge Cup victory listed here, along with a few Nehru Cup triumphs.
But India’s jewel-in-the-crown tournament had already been diminished, with invitations being extended only to those who wouldn’t really make us look like fools. We grew tall by walking on platform heels. If Bhaichung Bhutia, as captain, endorsed the ploy, it might have been down to his own unremarkable stint with Bury FC on a three-year deal in 1999. He was the first player from independent India to find a club in England, though.
Surajit Sengupta, without really trying, had landed an opportunity in West Asia after the 1978 Asian Games which he didn’t take, but Sunil Chhetri later made his way to Sporting Lisbon B in Portugal and Kansas City, USA. Gurpreet Singh Sandhu has gone the farthest of all, joining Stabeak in Norway in 2014 and playing a Europa League qualifier in June 2016.
All of which could mean that if India had yet to gift its Ronaldos and Messis to the world, it hadn’t got around to chancing upon them. To reiterate what has already been iterated, that’s the central problem. Even George Best wouldn’t have happened if Busby’s scouts hadn’t kept an eye peeled. Maybe things would change some day. Meanwhile, let us sing “We shall overcome” lustily, loudly.
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Abdul Majeed Kakroo: The story of football in Jammu and Kashmir
Abdul Majeed Kakroo has had a disproportionate impact on local football. In fact, his is the story of the sport in the Valley.
Abdul Majeed Kakroo remembers walking home at a furious pace, slamming open the door, picking up a couple of medals and walking straight out, without mentioning a word to his startled wife. It was a pleasant spring day in 2007. And Kakroo was enraged.
Word had gotten out that the then chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Azad, wanted to convert the TRC Ground into a tulip garden. Kakroo didn’t mind the tulips, but was sure the move would’ve brought an end to football in Srinagar. “A few decades ago, there were around 25-26 grounds in Srinagar. But one by one, all those grounds were encroached upon and now they’ve constructed buildings on them. TRC was one of the few grounds left, there was no way I could’ve seen a tulip garden developed there,” he says.
So Kakroo, the first player from Kashmir to captain India, took it upon himself to protect the stadium. “I had two South Asian Games gold medals, and I said I will burn myself outside the secretariat,” he says, sounding agitated even as he recalls the episode. A few other notable sporting names from Kashmir joined him in the protest, and Azad eventually had to relent.
On Tuesday, the first-ever I-League match in the Valley, between Real Kashmir and Churchill Brothers, will be played on that very ground. Kakroo might have stopped playing more than 25 years ago. But he continues to stamp his authority on the state’s footballing landscape even today.
“Majeed bhai hai toh Kashmir mein football hai,” says Mohammad Yousuf, the coach of a local team. Around here, Kakroo is more than just a footballer. Everyone has a Majeed bhai story. But Majeed bhai is quite a storyteller himself.
Kakroo played football in more than a dozen Indian cities, in front of thousands of fans. But it’s the games he played post midnight at Lal Chowk, the Srinagar city centre, which he remembers most vividly. This is back in the 1970s, when around 25 men used to converge on a tiny square between the Palladium Cinema and the Clock Tower. “That was the only spot in the entire city which had streetlights. So after the 12 o’clock show ended, our show used to begin,” he says.
The skills he honed as a street footballer took him to places he could never imagine. In the second half of the ’70s — 1977 to be exact — the Road Transport Corporation (RTC) team offered Kakroo his first professional contract — with a salary of Rs 180 per month. RTC was one of several government units big on football. And for a son of a vegetable vendor who’d started playing the sport using crumpled paper as a ball, this was a princely sum. But it was just the beginning.
Teams from Kashmir, in the late 70s, were known for the individual brilliance of a few players. But collectively, they rarely posed a threat. “At the Durand Cup, we were known as the savere-waali-gaadi-se-chale-jaane-waali team (a team that’ll take the morning train back) since we’d travel all the way to Delhi, lose the first match and return,” he laughs.
That reputation would change in 1980. Kakroo’s team RTC, playing its first Durand Cup, reached the quarterfinals, where they lost to JCT. “Pehli dafa tehelka macha dia (We created a stir in our first appearance). I ended up scoring 18 goals in that edition,” he says.
Kakroo had drawn the attention of the national team scouts and GMH Basha, the then India coach, summoned him for a national camp in Bangalore. Kakroo packed a few belongings and took a bus from Srinagar to Jammu first. He then embarked on another long bus journey to Delhi, from where he boarded the train to Bangalore. It took five days for him to reach the southern city.
But the long journey proved futile. Kakroo wasn’t selected for the national team. “Left paanv banaa aur phir aa (improve your left foot and then come back to me),” the coach told me.
At first, Kakroo didn’t quite understand what Basha meant. There weren’t any qualified coaches in Kashmir who could decode those words for him, either. But he realised the flaw in his game. “So during training, I started to wear a stocking over my right football shoe and then put a sharp stone inside it. If the ball touched it, my toes would pain unbearably. That way, I forced myself to control and kick the ball using only my left foot,” Kakroo says. “I did that for several months and left paanv banaya.”
At the Rovers Cup the following year, Kakroo says he scored 26 goals. The clamour to include him in the national team grew, but the team management chose Biswajit Bhattacharya ahead of him. Kakroo is dismissive of the Kolkata striker. “Woh hero jaisa dikhta tha. So they took him, and I returned to Srinagar..
Abdul Majeed Kakroo: The story of football in Jammu and Kashmir
Abdul Majeed Kakroo has had a disproportionate impact on local football. In fact, his is the story of the sport in the Valley.
But when he scored back-to-back hat-tricks in the Santosh Trophy in Thrissur that year, they couldn’t ignore him anymore. For the next eight years, Kakroo remained a constant in the Indian team and even captained the side. He went on to become one of the highest-paid footballers in the country after Mohun Bagan offered him Rs 60,000 per month.
“My first salary was Rs 180.” he smiles. “Subrata Bhattacharya (former Bagan defender) told club officials one day, bokac***da, isko Kashmir se laaya aur 60,000 deta hai aur mujhe 45,000. He even accused me of ‘buying’ one section of the crowd to cheer me during matches! For more than one year in Kolkata, I didn’t have to pay for a cup of tea. I even saw all movies for free!”
Those were heady days for Kakroo and, in turn, for football in Kashmir. But all that would change in 1989.
Majeed Yousuf, who played for the state youth teams and is now a football administrator, remembers the early days of the Kashmir conflict in a different way than others. “I was returning from a tournament in Sonepat and on the way back, when we entered Srinagar, the streets were completely deserted. I could only see men in uniform,” he says.
Later that evening, he heard that Kakroo was detained by the forces. “And I thought, if they can do that to him, then it could happen to anyone,” Yousuf says.
Kakroo recalls the incident. “I was walking to the training ground and two vans zoomed in. One stopped in front, another behind me. They thought they had arrested some big terrorist. Eventually, they checked my ID card and let me go.”
Another time, they barged into his house in the middle of the day during a crackdown and, along with a few other men from the neighbourhood, herded him to a nearby ground where he was made to sit on his knees while the forces searched his house. “All they could find was some footballs, jerseys and medals. It kept on happening. It hurt. I’d played in every corner of the country and in 25 countries. It was humiliating.”
Kakroo cut short his playing career and returned to Srinagar to be with his family during those volatile times. From 1989 to 1996, football came to a complete standstill. But still, there was hope. Whenever curfew was lifted, even if it was for an hour, the youth invested that time in playing football, Yousuf says. As life limped back to a semblance of normalcy, football once again became a priority. And Kakroo was in the forefront of it. He began coaching local teams, where he spotted Mehrajuddin Wadoo — who went on to play several matches for the national team.
“Still, we lost an entire generation of players. This was one of the major reasons why sport collapsed in this region. If you played at TRC or Polo Ground, there was a risk that you could be arrested. These venues were out of bound for us,” he says.
Kakroo had seen how football had died when the TRC Ground was snatched away from them. So when Azad chose that as the location for a tulip garden, one can understand why he was enraged. “I had to protest, and I wasn’t alone. The entire football fraternity was with me,” he says.
The garden, named after Indira Gandhi, was then made on an open space near Dal Lake. It’s the biggest of its kind in Asia and was opened for visitors last year. On Tuesday, a refurbished TRC Ground will witness a landmark moment of its own. And to the relief of many here, especially Kakroo, it’ll be about football.
https://khelnow.com/news/article/afc-announce-2020-u23-championship-qualifiers-groups
A dog’s dinner or worse!
Indian football’s slide started midway through the 1970s, never to be arrested, after all... The country’s major clubs are just as responsible for its football gloom as its national federation because finding and grooming talent — FIFA and its loyalists call it youth development — is alien to their nature.
When Michael Jackson moonwalked, his fans simply went wild. But try coaxing and cajoling someone into going down Indian football’s memory lane and chances are you will have even the die-hard buff of the game rolling his eyes, consulting his wristwatch and remembering an important appointment a mile and a half away. That is not because you or I can’t sing like Jackson, but due in a large measure to the general impression that it is where history keeps repeating itself, tragedy having long been indistinguishable from farce.
The slide started midway through the 1970s, never to be arrested, after all. And as one started looking up one’s old, dog-eared notepads for this 40-year retrospective view, the boom of the voice in New Delhi that barred India from the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia — saying, in so many words, that the Indian Olympic Association preferred medal prospects to also-rans — came through clearly wherever you were.
It was World Cup time and no one had any use for something that had mostly been dismissed as a dog’s dinner. Or rather, the leftover of it. Indian football modestly pointed at a rise in its global ranking, its victory in the self-conducted Intercontinental Cup and its Asian Cup qualifying success. But you can’t fool all people for all time.
FIFA’s scheme of things being what it is, ratings rise if you keep playing muppets and winning, which explained both the trophy triumph and the ascent to the Asian Cup finals. What the national federation hid from us was that India had once played an Asian Cup final (1964). The IOA’s rejection of the All-India Football Federation’s Asian Games request, even though the AIFF was game for picking up the tab, was a throwback to the event’s Hiroshima edition (1994) when football was similarly tackled.
But the 2018 snub drives home the fact that the AIFF chose not to learn its lesson and copped a repeat insult which essentially made it clear that the structural tinkering it had resorted to — the National League (1996) which later became the I-League, the Indian Super League (since 2014) imposed by its marketing whizkids — in the period being reviewed was so much sawdust.
None of it went even halfway towards altering the truth that, after more than a century of playing the game, having been the first Asian country to make an Olympic football semi-final (1956), won two Asian Games gold medals (1951, 1962), we got nowhere near the World Cup since the AIFF began centralising its tournament organisation. Truth to tell, what became increasingly, and alarmingly, clear was that it wasn’t even interested in building on the successes it had achieved in the past even though the competitive field was getting wider and proportionately tougher as West Asians, Central Asians and, later, Australia too got in.
The Federation Cup kicked off in 1977 and the other competitions followed, complete with sponsorship and television coverage, and the AIFF maintained the expressionless calm of a pin cushion as the most important contests in the land grew alarmingly anaemic. Ruin followed. When was the last time you — or Mumbai — heard of the Rovers Cup being held?
Given that the Indian Army is committed to carrying on with the Durand Cup, it only limps on. New Delhi hasn’t seen a final of it at its Ambedkar Stadium for some time. It has a peripatetic existence now, like a travelling circus. Going by some reports, its forthcoming edition could be held in Kolkata. But in that eastern Indian metropolis, its own Indian Football Association Shield, where all major teams wanted to do their best at one time, is edged out of the bigtime calendar by the big-noise shows of the national federation now. It trudges on as an under-18 tournament, largely ignored even by the local press, which is aware of the age-faking that goes self-defeatingly on.
More of that, later, but the point about the virtual withering away of India’s traditional football platforms, which supplied us with a plentitude of talent in happier days, is that it throws into sharp relief the vapid thinking behind the gigs thought up during the period we survey. When the National League kicked in even as the Federation Cup was showing signs of being fearful of the tackles put in by Time, it was part of the guff of Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, then AIFF chief, that we needed to modernise the game in this country. But he could raid only the public sector’s treasury, among whose custodians were people scared of his political or, worse, ministerial power.
Asked, by this correspondent, how he proposed to persuade corporate houses to part with their cash for Indian football, Dasmunsi, who was only nurturing yet another constituency in the time-worn and weather-beaten manner of a hard-boiled power-grabber unencumbered by scruples, once said: “The press is central to it because it can create an ambience of hope.” Shorthand for PR work, that. He knew he wouldn’t be spoken to again.
But if you care to look at the way things have unfolded, huge chunks of the corporate sector, put off by the way the AIFF has gone about its business, have simply left the field. Orkay, Mafatlal, Mahindra and Mahindra, JCT Mills: the list can be lengthened without substantive additions. Government entities like Food Corporation of India have lowered their own profiles.
A dog’s dinner or worse!
Indian football’s slide started midway through the 1970s, never to be arrested, after all... The country’s major clubs are just as responsible for its football gloom as its national federation because finding and grooming talent — FIFA and its loyalists call it youth development — is alien to their nature.
The ISL was yet another ill-conceived project, with its qualitative appeal predicated on has-beens, regardless of how big they once were. In football, you lose a lot when you lose a yard of time-specific pace. We can’t afford the players China targets — and gets. AIFF vice-president Subrata Dutta was ecstatic before it started, speaking of being able to “sell” Indian football at long last. All insiders realise now that it’s not really a success story. When it comes to sport, people don’t come rushing in to pick up any junk laid attractively out.
But India’s major clubs are just as responsible for its football gloom as its national federation because finding and grooming talent — FIFA and its loyalists call it youth development — is alien to their nature. Matt Busby deemed it his primary job in Manchester United. We, surrounded and shepherded by smartypants, take the existence of talent in our teams, national, regional or whatever, for granted and proceed accordingly.
“Yes, that’s true,” says Arun Ghosh, 1962 gold winner who later coached India and was chief of the Tata Football Academy. “We’ve never had a scientific approach to scouting and training. Things are really bad today, because India let themselves down in the U-17 World Cup and unless we shift our attention from getting up blockbusters to working at the grassroots level, we’ll deteriorate progressively.”
That rampant age-faking, allegedly pioneered by Bengal in the 1970s and continuing to this day, in its quest for national-level glory, scuttles whatever is attempted in terms of learning and progressing is another area of darkness. Decades ago, Sailen Manna, a former Olympian who’s no more, told yours truly: “If you want to kill the game, let age-fakers loose.”
But Indian football lives. And it will do so because it gives us intermittent glimpses of excellence that impress everyone. In 2001, India edged 1-0 past the United Arab Emirates, coached by Henri Michel, in a World Cup qualifier. Bengaluru FC made the Asian Confederation Cup final in 2016; in 2008, Dempo Sports Club got as far as its semifinal, beating several West Asian teams on the way. East Bengal won the Asean Club Cup in 2003. Die-hard fans would also want India’s 2002 LG Cup victory in Vietnam, its runner-up finish in the one-off 2003 Afro-Asian Games, its 2008 AFC Challenge Cup victory listed here, along with a few Nehru Cup triumphs.
But India’s jewel-in-the-crown tournament had already been diminished, with invitations being extended only to those who wouldn’t really make us look like fools. We grew tall by walking on platform heels. If Bhaichung Bhutia, as captain, endorsed the ploy, it might have been down to his own unremarkable stint with Bury FC on a three-year deal in 1999. He was the first player from independent India to find a club in England, though.
Surajit Sengupta, without really trying, had landed an opportunity in West Asia after the 1978 Asian Games which he didn’t take, but Sunil Chhetri later made his way to Sporting Lisbon B in Portugal and Kansas City, USA. Gurpreet Singh Sandhu has gone the farthest of all, joining Stabeak in Norway in 2014 and playing a Europa League qualifier in June 2016.
All of which could mean that if India had yet to gift its Ronaldos and Messis to the world, it hadn’t got around to chancing upon them. To reiterate what has already been iterated, that’s the central problem. Even George Best wouldn’t have happened if Busby’s scouts hadn’t kept an eye peeled. Maybe things would change some day. Meanwhile, let us sing “We shall overcome” lustily, loudly.
https://thefangarage.com/articles/15756-mohun-bagan--atk-merger-srinjoy-bose-drops-some-heavy-hints