This article was originally published in the Advanc’edge magazine brought out by IMS and was written before India’s stunning AFC Cup win. This is the first part of the article
The idea for this article came when a friend asked me this – why does a country where so many people stay up nights to watch and be passionately involved in football cannot attain global standards in the game
The simple answer would be that football is the most popular sport in the world and our passion for the game is nothing compared to the passion exhibited by fans in South America or Europe or even Africa for that matter. If there was some way to rank nations in terms of their passion for football, India’s ranking would be in the neighbourhood of their FIFA ranking of 153. Therefore my friend, we have nothing to complain about our failure to attain global standards as our passion for the game is not at par with global benchmarks.
But then , there is another side to it as well- we are a nation of 1.2 billion and even if a small percentage of the population was dedicated to the sport, we will have a large enough pool of players (more than the population of many nations) to be able to field a quality side.
Also the fervour for football in India compares favourably to most sports. A tournament in faraway Europe evoked such passions that national dailies were forced to give cricket news (involving the national team no less) second class treatment in favour of football news. Few sports can claim to have matched football in that regard but most of them can make another claim – India fares far better at them as compared to football. Therefore my friend’s original question can now be reframed as
A) Why are we ranked number 153 in football in spite of our huge population (and supposed ability to have a large pool of players) and all the passionate support for the game
Or
B) Why for all the passion, our football team fares poorly as compared to teams in many other sports which enjoy far less viewer interest?
Now for the answers. First the ones to do with the nature of the game itself
Football is a physically demanding sport
Top quality football requires a high level of stamina, strength, speed, fitness and agility – Indians are typically lacking in all of these. We typically fare better at sports whose physical demands are far less – like cricket
But how come we do a lot better at tennis and hockey which are also very physically demanding. Well we could have done a lot better at these sports if not for our physical ineptness. Our decline in both hockey and tennis has coincided with these two sports taking on a more physical nature. We have always depended on the dribble in hockey and on touch play in tennis
Run of the mill African players manage to become stars in Indian football owing to their vastly superior physical conditioning as compared to the Indians. Other sports where we have done well in the recent past – Chess, Golf, Shooting, Billiards – none of them are very physically demanding
Indians don’t have a lot of natural football talent
Extravagant talent can make up for lack of physical prowess and a lot of other things as well. Like it does in the case of the South Americans. The dribbling and juggling skills of average Brazilian kids would put International players from other nations to shame.
Sadly for us, we don’t have the natural talent to cover for our physical shortcomings. I have never seen an Indian player, not a single one, whose natural talent could take my breath away. The fact that there are more than a dozen Indian-origin players playing county cricket but a mere one (Michael Chopra) playing in the premiership is also proof of a genetic lack of talent.
As compared to football, we still mine outstanding talents in other sports – Vishy Anand in Chess, Sachin Tendulkar in Cricket and Dhanraj Pillay in Hockey. Very clearly, we aren’t naturally blessed to play the game of football.
These two reasons are primarily why India can never be placed in the top 40 of FIFA’s ranking. But we are ranked 153. So obviously there are other reasons which help us cover the distance from 40 to 153. Time to look at them now
The lack of good coaching infrastructure for young kids with talent for football
Suppose you are the father of talented young footballer in India. Where will you send him to hone his football skills when he is eight years old – A football coaching centre in your city? Chances are that unless you live in a Mumbai or a Kolkata, there will be no such centre available in your city. Your kid can either learn from you or pick up another sport. He will have a far better chance of sporting success if he was into cricket or tennis or chess or even golf for that matter.
So what does a lack of good early coaching do to a potential footballer?
The footballer will suffer from poor technique, all his life. And most Indians, even national and international players actually do. The next time you watch a national tournament or see the Indian team in action, watch the players struggle with the most basic stuff – trapping a ball cleanly, heading and executing a simple flat pass. Most players develop their own make shift technique and manage with it somehow, till, they get exposed by a technically superior opponent.
The footballer also suffers from lack of football intelligence. Football involves a lot in terms of formations, positional sense and tactics. The team is usually more or less, than the sum of its individual parts depending on how well it does in these departments. A good coach exposes his wards to all these different aspects of the game and prepares them to adapt to different situations in their future football life. Sadly, young Indian footballers are not so well educated.
The fact that football is a team game and not an individual sport makes it worse
Prakash Padukone went to Denmark and practised regularly with Morten Frost. Both players improved tremendously. In an individual sport you need just one good practise partner to improve. Now consider the case of a team sport like football.
First, your team needs to have a lot of good players for you to get better. You will never learn to become part of a cohesive unit unless you do that. And then for this cohesive unit to get better you need to play against good opponents. So, a young footballer needs to play with 21 equally talented players to improve in all aspects of the game. This could only happen at well run youth clubs or coaching academies. Sadly, young footballers can’t do what Eklavya did in the Mahabharata – practise alone. This problem is something which afflicts hockey also.
And then there is the problem we have as a nation when it comes to team sports
Fundamentally all team sports have a problem in India because as a nation we always aspire for individual glory and are rarely willing to sacrifice it for the greater good of the team. The only team sport where we have improved is cricket and that is hardly a team sport in the truest sense. The need for teamwork and synergy is far less in cricket.
But forget cricket, other true team sports like hockey also have some advantages over football
Hockey has an identity but football doesn’t
The whole hockey world and sports fans all across the country know that Indian Hockey teams play in a 5-3-2-1 formation. This attacking style is adopted by teams all over India; at all levels. This is the bedrock of Indian hockey. Young players grow up with this formation in mind.
On the other hand football has no identity in this country. Even the biggest football buffs would be hard-pressed to answer questions about India’s style of play or its formation on the field. And not just about the current crop; questions about more successful teams of the past will also be difficult to answer.
An identity is important as it gives the young sportsman a clear path of his sporting life ahead. A hockey player can settle in a playing position at a young position and will possibly live with it for the rest of his playing life. He gets accustomed to a style and is already living and breathing it by the time he comes to the senior level. An Indian footballer on the other hand never learns a system. Every successful football nation has an identity. Dutch kids take their first steps with ‘total football’ on their minds while Italians are imbibed with the principles of ‘catenaccio’ from an early age.
Sadly, we have no football identity of our own in spite of the long history of the sport in this country. Getting closer to 153
But what about all the passion. Well time for another harsh reality of Indian football
Indians are passionate about football but only of the kind played by the very best
We don’t love football as such. We love top quality football – the kind played in the World Cup or the Euro tournament or by the top clubs in Europe and South America. Our passion is a seasonal occurrence. We are not football romantics who would stop on the road to watch a bunch of kids run after a ball. Except for some ardent souls in West Bengal, Kerala, Goa and the North-east, we do not have any local affiliations. In Europe, fans are crazy about their local side, even if it is the worst side in their country. In that sense we are football connoisseurs (who appreciate the finest quality) and not football lovers who love the game itself.
The unadulterated madness for cricket has created a cricket revolution in this country. Football, sadly, will never see a revolution as the passion is selective and highly diluted. The influx of foreign leagues on TV has been a bane for the domestic game. Earlier football lovers looked forward to watching top domestic tournaments like the Durand Cup and Federation Cup. Now you reject it as sub-standard and don’t care
But, In spite of everything, 153 is unjustified. So, we now come to something which is critical to the popularity of any sport in this country – the livelihood factor of a sport. This is the final step to 153
The second part of this article is in the next post.
