A few weeks back, I was at the mall to buy a pair of football boots. My old ones had worn out, or so I told myself. In truth, I was taken in by the bright new yellow ‘Nike Mercurials’ that some footballers have been wearing this season.
As I entered the store, it was back again. That same sinking feeling. The one I have been having since the past few years, each time I go out to buy a new pair — Are these the last boots I would be buying?
I had gone over comparison sites, read through user reviews, checked out YouTube videos. Still, I needed to try them out to see how they felt. The shoes were meant to have an ‘’additional level of springy underfoot to help you move faster on the pitch’’, said the marketing copy.
Thing is, I have been slowing down every year, and probably run at half my peak speed. I can’t dribble past players on pure speed anymore, something I could reliably use in the past. I can sense the waning of my muscle memory. I have been readjusting my game to this new reality. Sometimes old instincts kick in, I try taking on defenders, but with reduced confidence.
Cricket / Football
Football had come late in my youth, compared to, say, cricket. Sachin’s bat had flattened out an entire generation of potential footballers. Sachin has to be the proximate (if not the root) cause for football never really taking off in India. My friend from college, Akshay, once tried explaining the religiosity of cricket in India to our American flatmate — “Look, Mike, when a child is born, he is told ‘here’s your mom’s nipple, and here’s your cricket bat’”
The only time we’d play football was in the weekly PE classes at school — 30 boys, running after a half-inflated ball in ankle length grass. The teams would be decided in the middle of play. If the defender had a clear opportunity to score a goal at his end, he would switch sides on the spot, just like that.
These days, in the complex that I live in, I see kids, probably five-six years old, going through templated coaching drills, with bright training cones, color coded bibs and whatnot. Does it take away from the free spirited, instinctual ethos of football? Or am I pointlessly romanticizing?
The greatest footballers of the past came from the favelas of Brazil and the by-lanes of Buenos Aires, likely kicking around something ball-like down the road. Football, it seems to me, requires more innate, natural talent than many other sports. The nurturing and refinement can happen at the margins. Unlike Chess, for instance. The life story of the Polgar sisters and the ‘experiment’ that their father designed for them, proved to some degree that world-beating success in certain narrow patterned environments can be architected like a project.
I digressed.
While cricket’s place was never up for challenge in India, there were little-big footballing events that were a vent, a retreat, from the constant worry of Sachin getting dismissed. Sachin was never good for the cholesterol of a young nation.
There was the France ‘98 World Cup. It was the first time Indians (Calcuttans) realized that football could exist, and actually be watchable, without Diego Maradona. I remember the first time I watched the world cup, or any football, was US ‘94. It was the last tournament Maradona played in. My uncle would keep me up late at night to watch Maradona play. He had watched the 86’ world cup on Doordarshan, the first time an entire World Cup was live telecast in India. That World Cup was special, for reasons I pieced together later through a mélange of YouTube videos and articles singing paeans of Maradona. A team-sport had been reduced to an opera of one man’s brilliance and enigma. Whenever I am bored / stressed, I go back to the extended highlights of that Argentina vs. England quarter-final of 1986.
I had little interest in football back then, but for the vanilla muffins that my aunt would get from a local bakery in her hometown. Uncle and I would raid into the glass mason jar late at night, while watching the game. After the game against Nigeria, Maradona was escorted out of the ground, his hands held by a medical staff, what we learnt later was for a drug test. I didn’t know what a ‘drug test’ even meant. Right before the last group game vs. Bulgaria, the commentator confirmed that Maradona had been banned from the tournament. My uncle slammed the table loud enough to startle my aunt out of the room. We watched the rest of the game, half sleepy, strewing the crumbles of muffins all over the coffee table.
'99 was Manchester United’s treble year. The Champions League wasn’t broadcast on TV, or at least I know no one who saw it live. But everyone knew what had happened. The romance of that last minute in Barcelona drafted a generation of lifetime United fans, the spoils of which are still being leeched by the current generation of club’s flailing footballers and administrators.
Then, in 2001-2002, ESPN-Star broadcast a full season of the English Premiere League for the first time. John Dykes, the TV presenter, who had been a feature in Cricket broadcasts in India, made the switch to football. For a whole cohort of city teenagers across India, Saturday evenings were changed forever. In a matter of few years, there were six different national football leagues being broadcast across channels in India.
If football wasn’t really pushing cricket to the side, it had at least started nudging for a little space. City teenagers, with their newly installed cable TV connections and annual FIFA game editions, started moving away from cricket. The restlessness of post-liberalization India was starting to show. The youngest nation on earth had started pushing back against the languid purposelessness of five day long games. Ashish Nandy, the social theorist, once called Test Cricket a ‘surviving critique of pre-industrial times; playing leisurely for 5 days end of which there might be no result’.
Football didn’t reduce cricket’s aggregate popularity, but it did help push cricket into small-town India. Back then, Indian cricket team largely comprised of reasonably privileged individuals from three or four cities. Football, from that lens, might have broken the big city cricketing hegemony. MS Dhoni had made his debut in 2004. If one is to map the timeline of the number of current cricketers from smaller towns, with the rise of popularity of European Football in Metro cities, a clear causal chain should emerge.
Those Early Years
I would have been twelve or thirteen. Those days we had been playing a lot of volleyball. Occasionally, we would kick the ball to pass it around. We realized that it was easy to get a flight on the ball with the lighter volleyball. That was encouragement enough for the volleyball group to try out football. It was mini serendipity. Volleyball had anyway gotten a bit too sedentary for puberty stricken early teenagers seeking all kinds of release.
And so it went.
Getting people together for a game of football was never easy. Every evening, I would stretch out my legs in the living room sofa, next to the spiral chorded landline, and keep punching in numbers from memory, seeking confirmations for the next morning’s game. There would be wake-up calls in the morning. If the players didn’t add up, distant cousins, and friends of friends would be called upon. There was a certain problem-solving, hustle mentality to ensure there were an even number of players.
In the morning, there were established milk-run routes — who was picking who in what sequence. None of us had mobile phones. Assembling people for a game back then was crude and dirty, but it worked. It is one of those thousand things one wonders how it worked in the pre mobile-pre internet generation. There were no WhatsApp groups to aggregate responses, ‘in’ and ‘out’, check who had ‘read’ and was avoiding a response.
The Lament
It’s been more than 20 years now. I have moved out of the neighborhood I started playing football in. In the couple of cities I have lived in the interim, I was able to induct myself into random football groups. But for a few years, it completely stopped. The daily stack of priorities couldn’t accommodate football.
Then, in the new housing complex that I have lived in since the past few years, I found another batch of young footballers to play with. Almost everyone is half my age. They are culturally more entrenched in the game than we ever were, a testament to the commercial ecosystem that the sport has built over the past couple of decades. There is a nicely trimmed rectangular field within the complex, with actual goalposts, and not crooked bamboo sticks tied together. There is a WhatsApp group. But funnily enough, setting up a game seems more difficult than ever. As each friction gets removed, it is seemingly replaced with a distraction. The modern paradox?
Here’s my rant — There is a problem of abundance. The commercialization allows for being in the sport without having to play it — through annual FIFA editions, updated gaming consoles, Reddit forums, clickbait transfer news websites, YouTube tutorials for signature skills and moves. I have seen kids show up on the field just to practice a goal celebration. All the goal celebration choreographed better than the original — the Pogba dab, the Bale hearts, Messi’s two finger point to the sky, the Mbappé arms, and the Ronaldo jump.
Back in the day, we would need to hop from one field to the other, searching for a vacant one with (sort of) trimmed grass. We were the pre-turf generation. It was a problem of scarcity.
Or maybe I am just a sulky football tragic.
The Beautiful Game?
Football taps into some of our most primeval instincts. The first enactment of any modern sport, I imagine, would have been some version of kicking a stone down the trail. Football, in that sense, strips sports to pure instincts — the simplicity of a ball and the instinctual movement of the limbs on it, not constrained by techniques and footwork and head position. Where other sports constrain, football liberates. Don’t get me wrong. Football requires technique, but it’s not as textualized.
Once one of my traveling cousins, who was staying at our house, came along for a morning game. I was having a bad game — easy misses, getting tackled too easily, getting bullied by Chetan, the defender. Then, this one time I was able to get past the defender, but he mischievously left his leg dangling. I fell, and was denied a goal. I got up to him and pushed him with both hands. I blurted a few words, invoking the women of his house.
“I will come over to your house in an hour with my ‘henchmen’, pull you out and rip you open”
“Sure, come, I’d be waiting.”, Chetan replied
My young cousin started crying.
After the game, Chetan and I changed our footwear, seated next to each other. We got ourselves ‘nimbu paani’ from the cart outside, and said byes. Neither of us remembered the exchange we had half an hour back.
Football (and sports in general) channelize our violent base instincts, and the modern existential angsts that we all live through. It makes them benign (only if you take the sport seriously enough).
Postscript
I have been lamenting the lack of passion in amateur football games these days. A missed chance, a bad tackle, a mis-pass — no one seems to be reacting with enough passion anymore. And this is of course only on days when people actually show up for a game.
Then, the other weekend, I looked out of my apartment window. Some younger kids were training in 5 a-side game. One of them tackled the other. It was a reckless one. The one who was tackled got to his feet. He was full of rage. With one swift move, he connected a Muay Thai like kick on the tackler’s waist. Then a failed punch to the face. The coach had to finally separate them.
Oh, it was beautiful. Football always gives hope.
You will take so long to write a post haan?
Loved it. Just loved it. There are too many fine strands which you didn’t explore because they are all done and cooked. Yet, dialing phone numbers from memory, sachin flattening out a generation of footballers...just too good. I was sure Chetan and you would forget about the altercation after the game. Oh and talking about Chetan, I just loved the way you weaved him into the story. It was like I will go ‘of course, Chetan, the defender’.
I didn’t have an ecosystem around me that was football aware so all what you have mentioned (including a mid match drug test…wtf!), was news to me. I was too focussed on godknowshwat while growing up, which is why I haven’t grown up yet. Thank you for this post.
These pics by the way…your own?
You will take this long to write a post haan?
Well, if it would be as beautiful and evocative as this one, maybe it is fine…but do try one more sooner?