Saving soccer in India

Saving soccer in India

India is a country where the government administration, schools, educational bodies, parents, teachers, sports organisations and poverty, all do their bit to ensure that sportsmen and women of international quality are not produced.
In soccer as in every sport, India fails to excel, and consistently fails to profit from the natural talent which a country of 1,000,000,000 people produces in abundance. Not only this! The continued dominance of veteran athletes like PT Usha (though admirable) is testament to a progressive failure to improve sporting performance, relative to Indian standards of the past!
With it's huge, economically comfortable middle class population, and the hundreds of crores of Rupees which are spent in the name of sport, it is an amazing feat of mis-governance that the natural talent which must exist in such a huge population is not nurtured, developed, and encouraged.
The culpability of the Sports Authority of India in India's sporting failure is obvious. A complete lack of effective, coherent, sports development plans, combined with antiquated coaching, redundant grandiose stadiums, and a paucity of sports pitches, all go to produce the great white elephant of the SAI.
The absurd government policy of promoting employees on seniority rather than merit/skill means that even when something is done the outcome is usually years behind the times. Even recently qualified SAI soccer coaches are teaching systems of play which are totally out of date. (In the recent soccer tournament at Sanawar all the teams, except the SSA coached Bishop Cotton, played a formation which was last used by the leading teams in the 1962 World Cup! {4-2-4}. None of the players on any of these teams had been taught basic modern, soccer techniques)!
Obviously the Sports Authority of India must shoulder most of the blame for India's dismal performances, however, specific sports authorities, local authorities, parents and schools, all conspire to make India the least sporting nation on earth.
While other nations have developed specialised PE and sports curricula in their schools, India still adheres to the kind of PE that was introduced during the Raj. A PE designed to subjugate and control, not to produce embryonic modern sports persons! Most schools see PE periods as periods for Drill or games and most do not have a progressive, age specific syllabus. All modern sports require specialised teaching and progressive age specific development programmes, but this does not happen even in 'prestigious' schools.
Another area where sport takes a back seat is in the mania for cheating and winning through gamesmanship. A manifestation of this is to be found in the organisation of almost all Soccer Tournaments. It is common practice to arrange school tournaments to give unfair advantage to the 'home team', and cheating is endemic in local and national tournaments. Numerous ruses are employed so that the host team will do well. For instance Teams which are likely to beat the host team are not invited, and over aged players played flouting tournament rules. Every year a team which cheats wins the nation's biggest schools soccer tournament, The Subruto Cup, and every year the organisers let them continue in the competition!!!
The passion for Cricket is also an impediment for sporting development
(It is debatable whether cricket is a sport, but it certainly is a national passion.)
Designed as a leisurely game to exclude workers and poor people, you still do not have to be physically fit to compete at the highest level. Fatties such as Gatting, Cowdrey, Inzaman , Salim Malik, and our own Sachin, can and do shine. Also because it takes so long to play, few people take up the serious "sporting" form of Cricket and their involvement is limited to childhood play ground/street games (In almost all countries cricket is run by and for ex private schoolboys).
In many respects chess and cricket have taken the place of sport in India , at the expense of all sport which requires high levels of physical conditioning and physical courage and commitment. However, even in cricket India fails! This, despite having three of the most gifted batsmen in the world, and probably the best batsman the world has ever seen!.
Meanwhile in soccer we struggle to beat Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal, teams drawn from minuscule populations and in Sri Lanka's case from a country torn by bloody civil war!
Finally the Soccer Authorities must be held in part responsible for the sorry state of the game in India. The All India Football Federation seems to suffer from endemic incompetence for it continually fails in every aspect of the management of the game. Huge crowds and support in Bengal and Goa and respectable numbers of spectators throughout India have not been translated into a progressive development system. The coaching and preparation of National teams is amateurish and appalling. The treatment of the national players by the AIFF is a absolute disgrace.
Even with FIFA support the AIFF has not been able to implement even the most rudimentary soccer development programme and like most other authorities is riven with cronyism, ageism and amateur ineffectiveness. (Ed: Even as we go to press the AIFF is being accused of allowing match fixing!)
However all is not lost and India could have a very good soccer team in the near future. In England Newcastle United, Leeds, Derby, and several other top professional clubs have brilliant young footballers of Indian origin on their books. All eligible to play for India.
How did these Indian players get to be so good? The answer is simple: they did not have to suffer the non-sporting culture of our society, or the mismanagement of the sport by the Soccer and Sports Authorities in India!
Will these young men play for India? Probably not, for that would require the AIFF and the SAI to have a revolutionary change in the way they operate.
The last thing which will be freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy will be the arts and sport. Until that day India will continue to be a no show as far as sport in general and soccer in particular is concerned.

by Bill Adams

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