Tapping talent

The Netherlands has won only one major football tournament. They did it in 1988 when they won the European Cup after beating a Soviet Union side that was one of the favourites of the tournament.

The result was 2-0 in favour of the Dutch. The second goal, scored by Marco van Basten, went down in history as one of the best goals in football history. Van Basten was lurking on the goal-line, when a crossed ball found him in the clear. From a “zero angle”, van Basten hit a first-time volley that curved out and then curled into the top corner of the far post, leaving the goalkeeper stranded.

This is not by way of comparison of any kind, but closer home a slip of a boy recently sent a corner bending outwards and then bending back in, prodigiously, to nestle in the top of the net in the far corner. No chance for the goalkeeper.

The boy in question is Dani P.K., a 10-year-old from Kerala. He is a class-five student of Presentation School, Kozhikode, and he scored the goal for the Kerala Football Training Centre (KFTC) club in the final of the All Kerala Kids Football tournament at Meenangadi in Wayanad district. He was chosen player of the tournament for the total of 13 goals, including a hat-trick in the final. The game was played on February 9.

The video of the goal went viral after it was shared by former striker IM Vijayan, with a short caption: “Superb”. It has got more than a 100,000 views and more than 2,000 shares. That’s all very well, one supposes. But the question is: Will it give Dani the opportunity to develop his undoubted potential.

At the time of writing, there have been no reports of the boy being offered top-quality training, either by a government agency or a private club or academy, which is not to belittle the training programme run by the KTFC. It is merely to point to the inadequacy of the scouting and training systems in the country.
 

In Europe and elsewhere, it’s pretty much certain that after the video grabbing attention, big clubs or academies would have beaten a path to Dani’s door to sign him into their training programmes. Unfortunately, most of the big clubs in India don’t have youth training programmes worth the name, depending almost entirely on signing already developed talent.

It would be unfair to include Manipur in this category. The state has been producing top-class talent with limited resources. A look at the national team sheets, especially in the different youth categories — under-19, under-17, etc. — shows the small north-eastern state’s dominance. There really is no point in cribbing about the standard of Indian football despite its 1.3 billion-plus population — it was ranked 108th at the end of last year, after rising to 96th in 2017 under former coach Stephen Constantine.

The whole system is not geared to producing top talent— as mentioned, neither the All India Football Federation nor private football clubs invest in the kind of infrastructure needed to develop home-grown talent, though they invest enough resources in players and coaches for their senior teams.

India has done a lot to develop top talent in cricket — partly because the game and the bodies that govern it attract the kind of money needed to develop quality infrastructure. But even in areas where there is practically no money by way of sponsorship or other deals the past few years have unveiled some exciting talent without much support. Athletics is a case in point.

Take Hima Das. This Assamese girl was born in a village in a family of agriculturists. She started out playing football but switched to sprinting on the advice of the physical education teacher in her school. Since there was no racing track nearby, she started out training in the paddy fields in her village. From there she went on to run the 400-metre and 4x400-metre sprints in the 2018 Commonwealth Games. With some institutional support, she went on to win gold in the 400-metre sprint in the World Under-20 Championship in Finland the same year. Das became the first Indian sprinter to win a gold medal in an international track competition. She’s won gold at a number of international championships subsequently.

Swapna Burman has a similar story. She was born into a poor family in north Bengal and was handicapped in her athletics career because she had six toes on each foot and couldn’t afford extra-wide running shoes. At the beginning of her career, she had to run barefoot. Despite this, Burman won the heptathlon gold in the 2018 Asian Games. She’s received some support in the later stages of career.

There was some sensation when it was reported earlier this week that a construction worker named Srinivas Gowda had run a distance of 142 metres in 13.42 seconds in a traditional sporting event in Karnataka involving running while tied to two buffaloes, also running. Extrapolated to 100 metres, this would have shown a time of 9.55 seconds, faster than Usain Bolt’s current world record of 9.58 seconds.

The bottom-line is that the talent’s there to be tapped.

Every week, Eye Culture features writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport