Let’s football! A look at India’s inability to play the beautiful game—and what can be done
football across the length and breadth of this well populated, cricket-junkie land were agog discussing the previous night’s two Euro group matches.
Jude Bellingham’s 95th minute goal — and England’s lacklustre performance against Slovenia — was discussed threadbare as if it was Gareth Southgate’s waistcoat. Also hogging the Monday tika-chatter was Spain’s impressive win against Georgia, Rodri’s performance especially garnering rave reviews from those who know that the “j” in “La Roja” is pronounced as an “h”.
The same day, FC Barcelona stopped all its football academies across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune.
Without giving any reason for its departure, the club stated on its website a fortnight before that the families of all the kids in its programme — which started operations in 2010 allowing “thousands of youngsters… [to] learn to play football in the Barça style and with the club’s values” — had been informed of operations being shut down.
Titled, “Thank you for everything, India”, the notice sounded more like “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” It seemed like 14 years since arrival, the aliens had left finding no intelligent footballing life in the vast playground of Planet India.
And there we have it, that old chestnut coming up again — apologetically, with embarrassing astoundment, not even with a mention in the Vedas to find solace of past Indic grandeur — every time there’s an international football tournament like the Euro or World Cup: When will India be a “world-class” footballing
