Thursday, August 30, 2007

Indian Football ....

Yesterday India won the Nehru Cup defeating a much higher ranked opponent Syria in the finals.Indian team under the able stewardship of coach Bob Houghton has been turning in good performances for quite some months.India team played few matches in Portugal against third division teams and did quite well in not losing any of the matches.For long Indian football was Baichung Bhutia and vice versa but now we have some good youngsters coming up in Sunil Chhetri, N.Pradeep, Manju to name a few.But until big money comes into football ,we will have to be satisfied with a occasional win against equally bad teams, if not worse.Its high time that sponsors start looking at football stars instead of our overly paid cricketers.
After the match ,one man tried to corner all glory and no it was not the captain or the coach of the team,but our very own AIFF(All India Football Federation) President Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, who has been lording over Indian Football for last so many years.This victory ,for all his rantings, has been achieved inspite of his bad influence on the running of Indian football.Mr.Dasmunshi announced a gift of ten lakh rupees for the victorious Indian team but the best gift from his side would be to step down as AIFF president and allow someone really knowledgible about the game to take over.As it is ,he is a high flying leader of Congress and a Union Minister,surely he can do with some rest and Indian football from him....

2 comments:

Unknown said...

There's lot of reasons why indian football is no where near asian standards leave alone world beating standards. Most imporatnt thing as you pointed out is the administration that looks after the game. Both hockey n football r suffering becoz of the gills n dasmunshis of the world. we need to first get rid of these tyrant no gooders. Other than that performance wise the team needs to start winning matches so that the people get behind it. But that will only happen when the infrastructure is there right from the junior levels. And thts an investment the admin needs to take care of. generally we indians are anyway not good enuff in any game which involves physical contact as fitness and physical endurance isnt engrained in our culture like it is with some other ones. but excuses apart, we need to seriously introspect and think whether a country of a billion cant put together a decent 11 in the football field or in any field for tht matter.

Anonymous said...

Well written article.