New Delhi: A common question often been asked by football followers of the country when India will take part in the World Cup? In reality, Indian football team is not good enough even to participate in the Olympic. The last time nation played in Olympics was way back in 1960. The authorities didn't even give green signal to participate in the 2018 Asian Games as the performance was under par. And long before FIFA was born, competitive soccer tournament was played in different parts of India.
Now the situation has reached to a stage where despite introduction of cash rich ISL, Indian football is moving to nowhere zone. There are individual brilliance, there are footballers like Sunil Chhetri but overall it's not going in the right direction.
Now why is Indian football in the grip of sepsis? Why AIFF couldn't manage to take the sport a few inches forward. Why football in India is moving one step forward and two steps back despite talents coming in?
These are the frequently asked questions from football fans in India. Shyam Sundar Ghosh, a former cricketer and journalist from Bengal tried to give answer to these questions in his book titled, Kick-off, Untold stories of Indian Football. The book has 28 chapters and the highlights are many controversial episodes of Indian football including why the most successful foreign coach Milovan left the country in the midway of his contracts?
Role of media, abysmal performance in the age group tournaments and what needs to be done has been encrypted in the book. Opinions of many football experts were taken while writing this piece.
Indian Olympic Sports after decades of overall failure are on a high since more than last 10 years. In Boxing, weightlifting, wrestling, shooting, athletics, archery, tennis we are doing well. India's performance in Badminton is steadily going up. The men's and women's Hockey teams have shown tremendous performance in Tokyo Olympics. For some reason India is showing hardly any growth in the most popular sport of the world, that is football. The book written by a former cricketer and journalist has dissected the reasons for the ills prevailing in Indian football.
"A country with a population of 135 crores can easily do something special in Football if the administrators take the sport to the right directions and I have tried to present the mistakes made in the past, so that the governing body of Football can rectify it and take the sport at par with the international standards ", said the author Shyam Sundar Ghosh .