It is heart-warming to see football once again finding favour among fans with the ISL acting as an effective catalyst.

Not a day passes when one does not feel strongly that what many of today’s sports fans need is an education in the history of the very sports they adore. Perhaps during lunch and tea breaks, or half-times, nuggets from the best of the past — as much as is available on film — should be telecast on big screens at grounds.

Television too can help with archival footage of times past when players who are now among pensioners accomplished as much — if not much more — than the megastars of today.

For, the present-mindedness of sections of today’s sports media, and consequently its consumers, makes it impossible to accommodate a longue duree perspective.

This is something that struck me the other day when a friend’s teenaged son triumphantly announced that his generation was luckier than his father’s because it gets to see in flesh some of the biggest football stars play in India, thanks to the Indian Super League — men such as Elano Blumer, Robert Pires, Alessandro Del Piero and Marco Materazzi in 2014 and Helder Postiga, Roberto Carlos and Lucio this year.

While this columnist has always been deeply suspicious of romantic cant and has repeatedly resisted the tendency to inflate the currency of the past, it did indeed come as a shock that the teenager knew so little about what took place in the beautiful game on Indian soil as recently as in the 1980s.

But then, for many of the present generation youngsters, that could well have been the age of dinosaurs — so deep into the past that much of it might be nothing but mere myth.

Yes, the Indian Super League (ISL) is among the best things that have happened to a great game that has often found itself in a beleaguered state in this country.

Last season saw average ground attendances ranging between an average of close to 50,000 per home game in Kerala and 22,000 in Chennai; the TV guys were not complaining either with viewership touching almost 430 million. While it may still lag behind cricket’s Indian Premier League, the interest that ISL has generated is pretty impressive.

Amidst all this, some of us might be guilty of both present-mindedness — which treats the past as something never happened, or even if it did, something that hardly matters now — and gushing boosterism.

Believe it or not, Indian fans of a certain age will certainly swear that they have seen some of the finest footballers of their time showcase their talents on our turf. And they are not wrong.

New charge of energy



In the 1980s, when the Jawaharlal Nehru Gold Cup tournament was at his zenith, the quality of the game on display released an irresistible new charge of energy into Indian football.

And the mid-80s saw world-beaters compete with each other in places such as Calcutta, Cochin, Trivandrum and Goa. The teams from the (then) Soviet Union, winners of the trophy four years in a row from 1985 to 1988, featured giants such as the great Rinat Dasaev in goal and Alexei Mikhailichenko up front.

In the 1982 World Cup in Spain, the peerless Pele, as well as two of his great contemporaries from Brazil, Zico and Socrates, had raved about Dasaev’s skills in goal. They believed the tall, athletic, soft-spoken man was the finest goalkeeper in the world.

The Hungarian team of 1984 had the gifted Laszlo Kiss in its ranks while the Argentine team of the same year, coached by Carlos Bilardo — who had just a few months earlier succeeded the legendary, chain-smoking, World Cup-winning ring master Cesar Luis Menotti — had a forwardline that included Jorge Burruchaga, the man who would score the World Cup final winning goal for his country in Mexico two years later.

The Polish team that went back with the trophy in 1984 depended hugely on the multi-faceted talents of Wlodzimierz Smolarek. All of these were men who played cultured football, a brand of soccer that was at once graceful and embellished by the fine arts of the game.

Of course, this is not an attempt at harking back to some Edenic past but merely an exercise in putting things in perspective.

Certainly, the international superstars of those days were not as popular in the drawing rooms, college canteens, bars and elsewhere those days as are men such as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and their peers today.

But this is because football then was yet to become a television staple and the religious fervour around the game was mostly to be found in Kerala, West Bengal, the North East and parts of metropolitan cities elsewhere.

This columnist covered six Nehru Cups in a row from 1984 and I have not seen on-site crowd passions quite like I did in Calcutta, Cochin, Trivandrum and Calicut. In Cochin, hundreds would queue up overnight and the spill over crowd was so close to the ropes that often players found themselves plunged into a mass of humanity when they went past the lines!

All these years later, it is wonderfully heart-warming to see that the beautiful game is once again finding favour among sports fans with the ISL acting as an effective catalyst for change.

“Without music”, wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “life would be a mistake.” So indeed it would be without the best of football.