Jokes Apart | Why India will never win the football World Cup (yet we love to lament about it)

There are three kinds of football fans in India: those who watch only cricket but switch to footie when the World Cup comes around; a smaller category of those who don’t watch cricket at all (unless it’s the cricket World Cup), but follow the English Premier League (especially the fortunes of Manchester United); and a tiny minority, which follows the football leagues around the world but no cricket at all. There are some things that can only happen in football, and which can leave a cricket fan puzzled or pleasantly bewildered. Like Neymar scoring a penalty against Korea in the last 16 and running to the stands to hug his injured teammate, the fullback Alex Telles. Like Tite, Brazil’s coach, making ten changes to the playing eleven, or Tite dancing with his team in front of the dugout to celebrate a goal, right in the middle of a match. Imagine Rahul Dravid doing the bhangra with Arashdeep Singh on the cricket field after the fall of a wicket. Growing up in the 1980s, watching the football World Cup was a rite of passage for most of us. It was a parched environment as far as the live telecast of international sport was concerned; we consumed every Wimbledon tennis match, every football game, with singular concentration. This is in contrast to the present glut — it’s not humanly possible to watch all the live sports action that is available to us now. It’s a curious paradox — we don’t watch football in normal circumstances, and yet, when the World Cup comes, we turn into a football-crazy nation. While Kerala supports Argentina, and Kolkata Brazil, the rest of us watch as neutrals, changing our allegiance with every match. It’s not a bad way to watch sports. It teaches us to appreciate the game itself, remaining equidistant from the distorting emotions of agony and ecstasy. We do feel something though, every time the Olympics or the football World Cup gets over. Why is India not there? The question returns like a comet after the iteration of a major sports event that we consume but are not a part of. The lack of participation and winning bothers us, but not for long. In search of easy answers, some litfest or the other will get hold of a well-known non-cricketing sportsperson and install her on the podium. The hapless sportsperson, the rare achiever in an ‘exotic’ sport, will then repeat platitudes: India is not a sporting nation, we need to inculcate a love for sport at the grassroots and school level (the word is always ‘inculcate’), we need more governmental support, parents are too obsessed with their children studying engineering and medicine et al. And then we go back to the IPL. Why is India not playing football at the highest level despite having a population of a billion plus? I have no answers. It’s a bit like asking for an explanation for our chaotic traffic; it’s just the way it is. Even if we take out the Hindi heartland, can’t Bengal, Kerala and the northeastern states produce enough talent? What about the millions spent on the sexification of desi football and creating the Indian Super League? What about the hundreds, if not thousands, of elite boarding and public schools of this country — equipped with expensive facilities and playing fields — all of whom claim to prioritise sports. And what of Indians settled in the United Kingdom? Playing football is an excellent career option, with job opportunities scattered internationally across various clubs in multiple leagues. But even there, one has never heard of an Indian playing for a Premier League team. The family-run corner-shop will do for most. The affluent ones join British politics. I don’t have answers but I do have some guesses. For one, in India, the ultimate symbol of ‘doing well’ is to have someone else press and massage your feet, even in prison. With two-thirds of the country engaged in pressing the feet of the one-third that is flourishing (and not using its feet), we simply don’t have enough legs to play with. Two, I have to return to that old chestnut of vegetarianism. Is it possible to generate strength and power via the snake gourd? Plant-based meats grown in the lab can help us balance religious taboo with sporting supremacy. Holding a veggie World Cup, where only vegetarian players compete, might be another option. Three, why do Indians prefer cricket to football? Could it be that football is a proper team game with no hierarchy, which doesn’t sit well with our society divided into neat boxes of class and caste? The kid who owns the bat will open the batting. No such luck for the kid who owns a football. The rich kid will bat and bowl while the servants will double as fielders. This has a long tradition. When the princes batted, the underlings fielded; when the Englishman batted, the natives did the honours. Four: there is too much singing in football. We just don’t have the songs. If India ever made it to a World Cup, the Indian fans will be at a loss for specialised football songs for the occasion. We will have to take recourse to Bollywood songs like ‘Chak de India’ or take troupes of folk dancers. Cricket is simpler, all one has to do is wave a flag and chant that primal chant: ‘We want sixer’. The fifth point is related to the one above. There is too much crying in football. Players cry, coaches cry, entire stadiums have teary meltdowns. Only the match officials don’t cry; I’ve never seen a referee crying. There are tears of joy and tears of despair. We’ve never seen Dhoni cry. After all these years, Kohli managed to eke out a rare solitary tear at the end of the Asia Cup match against Pakistan. Vinod Kambli cried after the 1996 WC semi-final loss. Cricketing crowds look crestfallen but do not wail. It’s not that we are not emotional people, except we reserve our public crying for movie halls. Six, the reason why we love watching football but not playing it, could also have to do with our aversion to contact sports, even though it doesn’t even come close to rugby. But then what about kabaddi? We all grew up playing it in school, a row of satchels forming the dividing line between teams. Even football was played with a small cork ball, where most Naughty Boy kicks landed on one’s ankles. Still, we are not that big on contact sports — could it have something to do with our traditional superstitions with ‘chhua chhooth’ and untouchability? Seven, even if our dislike for contact sports is a myth, it seems to me that we prefer sports ‘played by hand’ rather than sports ‘played by leg’. We are a ‘handsport’ nation. Volleyball, for instance, is the most popular sport in an Indian hostel, followed by carrom, chess, table tennis and badminton. The final point: maybe we just don’t want to get better at football, and this might have nothing to do with our natural talents but with our sense of exceptionalism. See, football is so common a sport, played by 250 million people across 200 countries. No fun in doing what everyone does. We do cricket and kabaddi. The flipside of this that we sort of know the score, the grim reality. Our sense of exceptionalism could be a fig leaf for denial. We know how difficult it is to make it to the World Cup. The Europeans and Latin Americans are impossible to dislodge. It’s taken the Africans decades to match up and compete; even then, in the previous edition of the WC, no African team made the last 16. As the recent examples of Korea and Japan have shown, Asian supremacy is a bit of a joke. The gulf between them and the big boys is a chasm. The Indians have had a hard long look at the big picture and decided it’s simply not worth it. We like to set twenty-year goals we can’t achieve. APJ Abdul Kalam had his Vision 2020. Our current President Droupadi Murmu has said that India can become Vishwaguru by 2047, the centenary of its Independence. To become a footballing superpower will take us an untold number of years. Why waste money, energy and effort on a vision that none of us will be around to see in our lifetime? Simpler to vicariously celebrate football every four years and forget about it. The writer is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth’, and the editor of the anthology, ‘House Spirit: Drinking in India’. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.