This World Cup in Brazil sees at least 250 million Indians fight sleep and turn on the TV sets late into the night, to catch their favourites, Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Thomas Mueller etc. in action. Every water cooler discussion the next day at the office is about whether Luis Suarez has psychological problems, or about what an absolute genius Neymar is, can he take Brazil all the way….Students wear the shirts of their favourite teams to college and bitterly argue over the previous night’s results. And what of the infamous organizers of betting in India? Apparently, this World Cup has meant more money coming their way than even the recent cricket tournaments.
We get it. Indians love Argentina and Brazil, among many other teams in the World Cup. Indians absolutely adore Lionel Messi. Indians love football. Then, why aren’t they any good at it?
The Indian team, representing a nation of 1.25 billion, ranks 161 on the current Fifa ranking. Even India’s tiny neighbourhood island-nation of Maldives, with a population no more than that of an average Indian town, ranks higher than India at football. No serious Indian football fan really believes that the Indian football team can even come close to qualifying for a World Cup in his lifetime. Indeed, most Indians, while knowing the strengths and weaknesses of all 23 members of the England squad, would be hard pressed to name even one Indian footballer. Indians love football. But Indian football? Does it even exist?
Are Indians forever condemned to being passive participants in football, delighting in the victories of nations several continents away, and getting dismayed at a poor performance from players who would find it difficult to point out India on a world map? Will India ever do anything of note in football?
Is it about money? Well, any one of the 8 IPL teams probably has a budget which is much higher than that of the Costa Rican football board. For all we know, Virat Kohli, India’s current batting sensation, probably makes twice as much a year as the entire Colombian team put together.
Is it because majority of Indians are poor? Well, Diego Maradona began his football career kicking a stuffed cloth ball on the streets of Buenos Aires. Luis Suarez, who may be an idiot, but is still the best striker in the world, worked as a street cleaner no more than 10 years ago, before getting his big break in football. Don’t tell me that people in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Honduras are richer than folks in India!
What about the facilities? Have you seen the last IPL tournament? One of the matches was held in a stadium with a media centre built as a giant space ship, much like that at Lord’s cricket stadium in London, but only bigger. Seriously, did Iran qualify to the World Cup as the Asian team with the best defensive record because of the facilities in Iran?
Some apologists for Indian football even blame malnutrition among a section of Indian kids, and the poor standards of health in India. Okay….does that mean people in African countries such as Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Ivory Coast are healthier than Indians or that the kids in these countries get much better nutrition? Ha!
And what about the most popular argument used by apologists? That Indians love cricket so much, that it is to the exclusion of other sports, and so football suffers in comparison. Apparently, if Indians shifted some of the attention from cricket to football, then a qualification in the next World Cup is but a certainty. Seriously? As discussed earlier, to say football is not as popular as cricket in India is disingenuous. Football enjoys massive popularity in India, it’s just that Indians don’t play it well.
Talking of popularity, how popular is footballs or soccer in the USA, or for that matter in Australia, compared to other sports? Truth is that most Americans and Australians could hardly care about football, and the majority of the public in both countries are known to get bored by it. Still, both countries have done exceedingly well at the World Cup. So it’s not about lack of popularity either.
Truth is there is no good excuse for Indians to be so poor at football. To blame India’s lack of performance of any sort on the football field to poor health, poverty, lack of facilities, overwhelming popularity of cricket and so on is simply being disingenuous and deflecting the real issue, which is that Indians don’t really like sports that require a lot of running, athleticism and stamina. People of India like doing things the easy way, and this extends to their sports – no wonder that the game of cricket, which requires more skill than athleticism, power or stamina, and played at such a lazy pace, is so popular in India.
Don’t get me wrong. I love cricket just like the average Indian cricket fan. But I do wish we were good at football and plenty of sports other than just at cricket. And even at cricket, we do badly at the only department in cricket that requires athleticism, stamina, speed and power – fast bowling. India has never produced an out and out fast bowler.
And the way things are going, we aren’t likely to ever produce international quality footballers either. Being passive consumers of football is all that we will ever amount to. So let’s get back to cheering for Messi’s Argentina, feeling dejected about Pirlo’s Italy and hating Suarez for being such a moron!
