The slow rise of Indian Football

The slow rise of Indian football
By Jesse Fink
While Manchester United was shellacking Hangzhou Greentown and Liverpool was putting Singapore to the sword in two grossly mismatched encounters this week in Asia, a far more interesting assignment involving an Asian team was taking place in Catalonia, Spain: Spanish third-division club Unió Esportiva Castelldefels versus India at the Estadi La Bóbila de Gava.India? In Spain?It's rare enough to even hear of any Indian football match, let alone one taking place in Europe, but this is a football nation that is aggressively trying to shed the weight of its oppressive history on and off the park. Oppressive because this country of 1.1 billion people, one of the fastest growing economies on earth, hasn't qualified for a World Cup since 1950. And it didn't even turn up for that event because at the time some of the national-team players preferred, believe it or not, playing without boots. FIFA wouldn't have it and so India withdrew from the tournament in Brazil. IndianFootball.com, the premier Indian football site on the web, gives a good account of the Catalonia match, admitting India "were having difficulty" coping with the "polished Spanish football" from the "taller and stronger" Castelldefels players but they surprisingly opened the scoring in the 24th minute through a long-range strike from Surkumar Singh and only conceded in the second half through a penalty to the home side. Not a bad effort for a team playing its first practice match of the year, even if the opposition wasn't the best team in Barcelona. Much more than the result, however, the game speaks volumes for India's ambition to get better at football, a sport that has a long and illustrious history on the subcontinent (as far back as the 1850s) but appears to have not seized the imagination of the public in the way cricket has. The truth is, though, football is wildly popular in India. It's just that Indian football isn't. Starry-eyed kids and the upwardly mobile middle class, as elsewhere in Asia, favour watching and supporting teams such as Arsenal, Barcelona and Manchester United over the likes of Dempo, Mohun Bagan and Pune. European football is not only of a high standard, it is aspirational. Indian football is neither - and it has the added misfortune of being compared to Indian cricket, which boasts arguably the most exciting players in the world who are paid sums of money even staggering by the standards of professional sportsmen in the West. If you were a kid in Mumbai or Kolkata with some athletic talent and a desire to own a fast car and marry a Bollywood actress, what would you choose? It's a no-brainer. That is just part of the problem. The other is an unwieldy football bureaucracy that you would expect of a nation made up of 35 states or territories covering over three million square kilometres. But that is slowly being dismantled and the All India Football Federation (AIFF) is currently in the process of overhaul, calling for new blood in the key positions of AIFF secretary-general I-League (the Indian domestic competition) chief executive. One of the secretary-general candidates, Goa Football Association secretary Savio Messias, says a World Cup is unrealistic. "Let us accept the ground realities. We can't dream of playing in the World Cup. We have to go step by step, think of Asia first and then the world."He may have a point.Until it qualified for Qatar 2011, India hadn't qualified for an Asian Cup since 1984 and it does seem a logical place to start. But, even still, a World Cup is not an impossible dream. Qualifying for the biggest sporting event on earth might be decades away, but who thought India would be the power in cricket it is today when for two decades between 1932 and 1952 it couldn't win a Test against England? Now, 50 years on, India virtually runs the sport. If the 21st century is India's to own, which on all the evidence at hand it appears to be, football has to be part of that story. It's time to write a new chapter.