tommcat
May 20, 2006, 07:07 PM
As the countdown has began for the Worldcup Finals, few days back I was busy searching for my Brazil jersey, as I was taking it out I got the Indian cricket colors coming out with it, just for a moment I wondered how crazy we are for football too, but still our country doesn’t make a mark in the world of football.
I feel it is really ridiculous to say cricket has much better following that football in our country. On any given day we have more football fans than cricket for sure. Football is easy to follow, cricket as such has more rules and more confusing. But the reason we all love it is because India wins and plays well against the best teams and on any given day we can beat anyone in the world. But can we saw about that in any other sport, esp. football…
Cricket was not like this during the early 70’s, hockey was more followed as we were champs and slowly even hockey was losing out, but all the change happened when India won the world cup in 1983 and years later great stars started to prop up and took it to unimaginable levels. So footballers needn’t crib about the nation following cricket more and no one bothers about them, they need to achieve something first, then everyone will surely look back. The structure and the governing body of football needs to change and they have to look forward to first do something at the Asian level, then qualify for the Worldcup prelims, then Worldcup Finals itself…
Reasons I feel football doesn’t prop up is because we have many internationals playing the local league and hence home talent is never nurtured. Firstly we need to put a ban or limit foreign internationals per team and also provide foreign coaches at all levels. Its no use having Indian coaches when we ourselves haven’t crossed any major level in football.
Hopefully by 2018 I would put back the Brazil shirt and pull out Indian football colors.
I feel it is really ridiculous to say cricket has much better following that football in our country. On any given day we have more football fans than cricket for sure. Football is easy to follow, cricket as such has more rules and more confusing. But the reason we all love it is because India wins and plays well against the best teams and on any given day we can beat anyone in the world. But can we saw about that in any other sport, esp. football…
Cricket was not like this during the early 70’s, hockey was more followed as we were champs and slowly even hockey was losing out, but all the change happened when India won the world cup in 1983 and years later great stars started to prop up and took it to unimaginable levels. So footballers needn’t crib about the nation following cricket more and no one bothers about them, they need to achieve something first, then everyone will surely look back. The structure and the governing body of football needs to change and they have to look forward to first do something at the Asian level, then qualify for the Worldcup prelims, then Worldcup Finals itself…
Reasons I feel football doesn’t prop up is because we have many internationals playing the local league and hence home talent is never nurtured. Firstly we need to put a ban or limit foreign internationals per team and also provide foreign coaches at all levels. Its no use having Indian coaches when we ourselves haven’t crossed any major level in football.
Hopefully by 2018 I would put back the Brazil shirt and pull out Indian football colors.