Spice gone sour
Once in demand, football talents from south find few takers….
The rapid decline of football down south has one telling indicator – the All India Football Federation’s player transfer list for 2009-10 season. No more proof is needed. While the rest of the country is a lot more active, the once-popular southern centres are starved of it. That this has led to a general drop in standards all over comes as no surprise.
Players made a beeline for Calcutta clubs before the inception of the National Football League in 1996-97. A few years into it, players from clubs in the south were in demand and most of the top clubs signed on someone or the other.
Karnataka, chiefly Bangalore, had been the biggest contributor to the national talent pool. Kerala came next. Tamil Nadu popped up a Sabir Pasha or a Raman Vijayan occasionally as did Andhra Pradesh. But with public sector undertakings like Indian Telephone Industries, Bharat Electronics, Bharat Earth Movers, defence establishments like the hugely popular Controllerate of Inspection Electronics and the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment no t recruiting footballers and with no private enterprise to fall back upon, talented footballers are very few.
Ever since Kerala Police, Titanium and State Bank of Travancore too suffering similarly, Kerala’s feeder lines too have dried up. Teams like Indian Bank, State Bank of India, Integral Coach Factory, Southern Railways have also met with the same fate. So too Hyderabad Police, State Bank of Hyderabad and SBI in Hyderabad.
The best of footballing talent in the country emerged from the south. The worthies contributed significantly to the success of clubs in Calcutta and also the Bengal team in Santosh Trophy. That Bengal has never won the Santosh Trophy this decade after the introduction of the domicile rule where players come back and play for their states is the most telling commentary on the state affairs in the game.
While clubs have opened up their purse strings and largely depend on foreign talent for their success, their refusal or inability to invest in junior and youth programmes ha left talent to simply drain away or seek alternate pursuits. And there are plenty today.
The AIFF has appointed Tamil Nadu’s senior soccer administrator CR Vishwanath to end politics in Andhra and bring the actions together to pave the way for the game’s growth. “Yes, I will do my best. Apart from talking to the people concerned and seeking their cooperation, I first want to start soccer activity there. More so at the junior levels,” said CRV, as he is known, in a chat with Express.
The AIFF must replicate these efforts in all states in the south. A CRV is needed everywhere, if not for patch-up, surely for a start-up. Only then can transfer applications increase in number.
Once, Bangalore was leading in exporting talent to other cities. But now, HAL, the only active club at the national level, tries to rope in players from the North-east. Nothing wrong, but that shows that the North-east has a surplus and not the south.
Source: THE NEW INDIAN EXPRESS, (Friday, 03 July 2009)
