It’s the World Cup season. Brazil, Argentina, Germany, England are again in the task of showing their team work, fighting for the glory. Girls are dying to see Kaka, running like a Cheetah or Villa sporting his trendy haircut. Young footballers are keeping a close look on Iniesta’s dribblings, Messi’s races, Robinho’s Samba. If u walk by your regular ‘paras’, you will see new faces; the new faces playing football along with the regular roadies. If you stop in a traffic signal and look into the jewelry showroom by the street, you will find the keepers watching the game in their TV, as still as statues; if you go to the park, where you pay regular visits for evening strolls, you will find no space even when it is 6 by the watch! There are posters, flags statues of Maradona or Pele all over the city. It’s madness after all. It’s World Cup after all. It’s football after all.
Then the day comes when Brazil succumbs and Argentina gets tamed. Messi flops and Fabiano cries. The living legends get entrapped by the new age warriors like Sneijder or Xavi. The ‘para’ club members, who have been shouting from the very first match to support their favorite superstars, start shouting at them. When Messi misses the post by an inch, someone from the crowd suggests to playing from behind; when Torres fails to prove his excellence, someone throws bottle at the TV set to advice him to get substituted. With all the agonies buried deep within their heart, the fans cry in pain to witness the loss of the great guns of soccer. They burn their effigies and flags. They tear away the posters with tears.
This is Kolkata, the city of joy; the city of strikes. This is the city where in every house, there is at least one person who has once ever wanted to become like Pele. This is the city where the students play football in the basketball courts of their schools. Here, people call Saurav Ganguly the “Maharaj” and also call Maradona the “God”. Every one, in a hundred people of the city knows how to play football. Every one, in a fifty knows about Barcelona and Manchester United. But only one, among a thousand gets the opportunity to experience the divinity, to play in a club and reach the pinnacle. So, might be there are very few clubs around you. Isn’t it? No. We know that there are hundreds of clubs around us. Each and every ‘para’ has at least one club which wants to make a new Baichung or Mehtab ( He rose from our ‘para’!). Then? “Actually there is no future in this career. How much can he earn even if he plays in the 1st division?”, said the maam, who was siiting beside me in SD4. Along with her, there was her kid, perhaps a 5 year old, carrying a huge bag( which I asked him to show later and the bag had in it 2 bats, 2 pads, one helmet, 2 pairs of gloves, arm guard etc etc and also water bottles, glucose etc etc) and staring surprisingly at me as I was speaking of his learning football instead of cricket. It’s true that we shout for Sachin, Saurav, Dhoni and Yuvraj at a higher level but it’s also true that we often fall out when there is game between KEB and MMB. So what can be the deciding factor that we send our colts to hit a “sixer”, instead of asking him to learn dribbling like Barreto or Christiano Ronaldo! May be broadcasting problems?( “Yes..that is a huge reason!”) We don’t have the privilege to see the local matches. Doordarshan, which is getting worse day by day, can at least broadcast these matches! Clever ones may opt for “podcasting”, but the thing is that how can we know about the local warriors if we go on sticking to same ESPN or Star Sports to see Ashle Cole running the whole day or Maicon playing both the ‘right back’ and ‘right wing’ the whole month(or may be the whole season!)? We know about the remotest counties of London and their players only because we see them on our channels. We know that there are Asia Cup, T20 Cup, Champions Trophy, Ashes only because we see the campaigns all day long in our favorite sports channels. So, if the local football matches are shown in the channels (well, even if it is Doordarshan), then we can know more about the game, more about the players. It can increase our interest and enthusiasm. Basically football is a game which is dependent entirely upon the players. It has got no sense of “grammar” (cricketers often use this word..sorry). It involves all the "six senses". It is felt by passion. It is a game where 11 brains coincide; where a 11 heart has to beat in the same rhythm ( by the way, may be out of the context, but Agarkar, successively ducked in 5 innings and still India won some of the matches; whereas Dhoni is a “grammatical player”? I am sorry. Fallacies you see… ).
If we are really so mad to shout for hours, even when the clock ticks 2 at the midnight, for a player, who lives thousand miles away, who doesn’t even know that we had been cheering for so long, then we are mad. Yes we are mad about the game. Can the Government hear us? We are mad about playing football. We need stadiums, proper stadiums, not like ‘Kalyani stadium’, where if you kick the ball to the bars, the goalkeeper saves the ‘mud’, not the goal. We need attention from all the levels of our society. CCFC and many other elite clubs have been arranging corporate football tournaments to spread the mania. Even in this year, there had been many tournaments in the city where many teams participated. We need a good broadcasting of the game through the channels. We need posters of Baichung, Subroto or Alvito to be hung around the city highs. We need to channelize our passion for the game. We have the blood of football. So, let’s start donating.
P.S: Some guys come to play in JU ground putting on original Nike or Adidas. It’s different if this increases their interest and love for the game or raises their “enthu”, but first of all, you people please learn to play with the ball, then play the “F” series :D
