Football is fading away from the blood of a Bengali…..

There used to be a time even in the late 1990s, when 8-9 bengali (mind you…not just players playing in Bengal) players used to take the field for India in an international match. Now there are hardly a couple. Bengal has not won the coveted Santosh Trophy crown for the last 10 years even with non-resident players.

If you are a die-hard fan of “Calcutta Maidan”, have you ever wondered why aren’t players like Krishanu Dey, Bikash Panji, Subroto Bhattacharya, Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Basudeb Mondal, Sudip Chatterjee and Sisir Ghosh, just to name a few, being produced today? I am not hoping for players of the calibre of PK Banerjee, Chuni Goswami, Sukumar Samajpati, Subhash Bhowmick and Arun Ghosh who used to win Asian Games medals for India, would set their foot on a soccer field again. However, I can expect the situation to be as good as the 1990s at least!!!

As far as I understand, there may be quite a few reasons for this. The average middle class Bengali these days is not persistent and persevering enough to take a tough body contact sport like football as a career. An increasing number of teenagers in the age of 10-12 are suffering from malnutrition, especially in rural Bengal,and hence are not physically strong enough to take up this sport. World football has advanced in technique, style and infrastructure, by leaps and bounds, but India, thanks to its lacklustre, dogmatic and amateur administration, has failed to generate enough interest in this wonderful sport, for youngsters to even consider a career in football.

We are getting caught in a vicious circle. Young Bengalis are not taking up football, therefore, we do not get enough Bengali players even in East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, and hence the crowd and the general public is losing interest even more alarmingly in the sport which used to be the life-blood of the middle class Bengali, which leads to more apathy and people not taking up the sport. There have been quite a few good initiatives by the Tata Football Academy of sending school teams to foreign countries to toughen them up, but for some reason or the other, the sport has really died off in the state.

Regions like Goa, Maharashtra and Kerala along with Punjab and Manipur, who were sitting ducks at the hands of Bengal, even till the end of the last millennium, have consistently flogged us in state-level tournaments as well as in club football. Really wish the situation to ameliorate some day in the near future….but alas!! That may not turn out to be the case!!