A Flat Tyre and the State of Indian Football

COLUMN: The Tunnel of Time 

By Shevlin Sebastian

Illustration by AI

On a whim, while on vacation, I went with my cousin to see a National League football match between F. C. Kochin and Mohun Bagan at the Jawaharlal Nehru International Stadium, Kochi. 

The date: February 12, 1998.

Forty-five minutes before the match starts, there are long queues before the stadium gates. In the large car park in front, there are several dozen cars, jeeps, vans and an occasional minibus.

“They are all out-of-towners, coming from places like Trichur and Calicut,” my cousin said.

Inside, the stadium looks attractive with its alternating orange, blue, yellow and red plastic seats in different sections and the four floodlight structures towering above the field. Half the stadium is already full. This is a Thursday evening, a weekday, but the crowd is already quite impressive. 

There is an air of expectation. The players of both the teams are limbering up on the field. A drum beat starts up on the terraces. People are hoping that F. C. Kochin would put it across Bagan in their home town. 

For so long Calcutta has been the headquarters of Indian football. Now, by overhearing snatches of conversation among the spectators, it is clear that the Keralites think that Bengal's aura of invincibility is over.

“I remember seeing Subhash Bhowmick and Gautam Sarkar in the Seventies. They were too good. Bengal doesn't produce players like that any more,” a spectator said. 

“But Bhaichung is excellent,” a man said.

“Most of the players in Bengal football are foreign imports. It's preventing the local talent from coming up,” a third person said.

The game, in unpredictable India, starts at precisely 6 p.m. From the word go, it is F.C. Kochin's match. They launch raid after raid on the Mohun Bagan goal. Shots by I. M. Vijayan, Carlton Chapman and Raman Vijayan go over the bar, by the side of the posts, straight into former Indian captain Hemanta Dora's very capable hands.

“Poor finishing, poor finishing,” people kept remarking. The spectators moan and groan in disappointment.

The quality of the football is so visually unattractive. The moves by both the teams are disjointed; there is no smooth build up of attacks. It all seems to be done so haphazardly. The contrast with the smooth moves in international football that we see almost daily on 'ESPN' and 'Star Sports' is just too much. I told my cousin this.

He gives a bright smile and says, “Be optimistic. Within 100 years, we should reach an international standard.”

The match continues. Bagan is in a comatose state. The only man who is awake is coach T.K. Chathunni, on the sidelines, wearing blue track pants and a pink T-shirt. He is jumping up and down and gesticulating and shouting like crazy at his players. The referee, Inayatullah Khan, blows a whistle in warning to him. Chathunni joins his palms together in a silent apology.

Break time. No goals.

My cousin tells me of the time in Dubai when he went to see a local football contest with an Arab Sheikh. The latter was going to see a match after many years of watching a game on TV.

When a goal was scored, he turned to my cousin and said, “Where is the replay?”

“In your head,” was what my cousin wanted to tell the Sheikh but didn't.

The match resumes. Somehow, F.C. Kochin have lost their spirit and rhythm. They have missed far too many opportunities in the first half. It has sapped their enthusiasm. Bagan senses it. They launch the occasional counter-attack. They are allowed open spaces.

Suddenly, a free kick is awarded, a few yards outside the box. Chima Okerie – barrel-chested, with tree-trunk-like legs – strikes a piledriver that hits the inner part of the bar and goes in (1-0). The spectators are stunned into silence by this goal, scored against the run of play. Despite all the talk about the centre of football moving from Bengal to Kerala, the former is still putting it across the home team.

With twenty-five minutes left for the match to finish, the crowd begins to walk out in droves. How quickly we give up, I thought. A country like Germany would think twenty-five minutes more of a match is like a lifetime. But not Indians, nor the F.C. Kochin players. The whole stadium has given up. It comes as no surprise when the end result is 1-0 for Bagan.

Outside, in the car park, my cousin discovers, to his utter chagrin, what seems to epitomise the state of Indian football: a flat tyre.

(Published in Sportsworld Magazine, March, 1998)