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6 years ago

Reflections on football, the global game  

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This year's Eid festivities have visited Bangladesh with a difference. Perhaps it is the first time a great world festivity has coincided with the jubilations of Eid-ul-Fitr, one of the two largest festivals in Bangladesh. The events found many in a state of bewilderment --- which one should be given more time? The Eid or the Football World Cup.  As a way out from this baffling situation, many divided their celebration between Eid and the football fiesta in their own ways. Enjoying the midnight matches, however, led to leaving bed late the next morning, with scores of peak-hour TV programmes getting passed over and the Cup dominating gossip and Adda at home and outside. To the relief of the fun-loving people, football takes far shorter time than cricket, another crowd-puller in the country.

Beginning on June 14, the month-long globally enjoyed FIFA World Cup pageant ends on July 15. Thus the countrywide jubilation is set to continue up to the day of the final match, when the fans' feverish excitement reaches its zenith. The excitement centres on the support people have for their respective favourite teams. In total seven days, June 29, July 4,5,8,9, 12 and 13 will have no matches.

No matter whichever is the host country or how logistically or financially competent they are, in the recent decades making the event more pageant-filled and organised than on the previous occasions remains a major concern of them. This year, the challenge to display its excellence has been taken by Russia. Waiting in line is Qatar, which will host the four-yearly event in 2022. For the 2026 tournament Canada, Mexico and the USA have jointly received the FIFA nod. Called United2026, the tournament will feature 48 teams and 16 host cities.

The mindboggling organisational juggernaut that now defines the World Cup Football tournament was beyond the thoughts of the host nations in its early years. Uruguay, the historic opener to the tournament, in 1930, saw only 590,589 spectators. Compared to it, the 2014 World Cup Football drew 3,429,873 football fans from across the world. These days, satellite-based TV channels broadcast the match live to millions of viewers in every part of the world.

In Bangladesh, football is unanimously considered the most popular sport event. It is followed by cricket. The traditional games Kabaddi, Dariabandha or Nouka Baich are also popular. But the popularity of football eclipses all of them. It has slipped out of the urban confines over half a century back. Football nowadays is played in almost every village of the country. Rural football tournaments are commonplace, so are the scenes of village youths and teenagers playing soccer on spacious 'charlands' or on paddy fields after harvest. Many villages have their own fields and grounds for football matches. Lately, cricket has been found making inroads into the rural sport arena.

Football has been brought to this part of the world by the colonial British soldiers in the mid-19th century. Since then it has continued to be played in the sub-continent, its popularity soaring to feverish pitches. Credits for popularising football in the sub-continent go to Nagendra Prasad Sarbadhikari, now recognised as the 'father of Indian football'. The soccer pioneer was the first local in undivided India to play football, with his classmates, at Hare School in Kolkata in 1877. Bengal, thus, deserves the status of being the first region in the sub-continent to play football as a competition. In 1888, a Football Cup was launched by the then Indian Foreign Secretary Mortimer Durand. It came to be known as Durand Cup.

In little over a decade after its introduction in England in 1863, football, a variant of rugby, began its triumphant global march. It continued to win players and fans in all the regions ruled by the British colonial empire. The game's global conquest only gained force as decades wore on. All this finally ended up with football being a sport event touching off strong passion and enthusiasm. Later, frequently unrestrained frenzy over supporting favourite teams became a regular feature. The sub-continent was no exception. The region produced dozens of football legends, especially in Bengal. The Bangladesh-born Goshtha Pal (1896-1976) dominated the Indian football in the pre-Partition times. In the post-1947 period India produced scores of legendary footballers. They included Sailen Manna, Chuni Goswami, Baichung Bhutia and a number of other soccer stars.  The growth of Indian football still remains centred on Kolkata, the capital of the state of West Bengal. This football-loving city is witness to a lot of memorable episodes related to the game. The most notable ones are the tournament face-offs between the archrivals East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. The other major team Mohammedan would also join the fray on occasions.

Post-Partition Dhaka also did not lag much behind. As a capital of the then East Pakistan, the city independently produced a new breed of footballers. However, although names like Kabir, Ashraf, Mari, Nabi Chowdhury, Gaznabi, Bashir, Pratap,  Bolai et al used to remain on the lips of local football lovers, a completely new era dawned on the Dhaka football after the independence of Bangladesh. The launch of Abahani, a team comprising talented and youthful players, virtually emerged as a historic event in Bangladesh soccer, another term for the game used in many English-speaking countries. In post-Independence Bangladesh, football clearly made a break with the conventional style of the game in place in the 1960s. The phase began with the Abahani Club. In fact, since then almost all the major football clubs have started infusing new blood in the game. Along with Abahani's Salauddin, Tutul et al, the Dhaka league tournaments presented brilliant payers like Zakaria Pintu, Kaisar Hamid and many others. Like in Kolkata, Dhaka too had its share of soccer-related rivalry, notably between the supporters of Abahani and Mohammedan. In Kolkata the supporters' hysteria remains mostly confined to verbal abuses. But in Dhaka it began resulting in violent clashes during and after a final match in the 1970s. Soccer violence has, however, long been dogging the game in some European countries.

 Unlike in the West Bengal capital, football tournaments have fallen on bad days in Bangladesh. Many of its fans have been weaned off by cricket. Except during the European and South American, and finally, the World Cup championships, football matches hardly create much stir among people. But during the World Cup, the apparition of the supporters' hysteric backing to their favourite teams sticks out its neck. During the World Cup in the last one and half decades, the whole Bangladesh has been seen being largely divided between two groups of supporters. One goes all-out for Brazil, the other for Argentina. In fact, it becomes a common spectacle in all the football-loving countries which do not have their teams in the Cup. 

It's interesting to note that a lot of famous people in different branches of the arts, politics and scholarship have shown their life-long love for football. On top of all, the Nobel-winning French novelist Albert Camus played for the national team of his country of birth, Algeria. Rebel Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, Premendra Mitra and their other contemporary authors were ardent football fans. In the modern times, Sir Richard Attenborough, Prince Charles and composer Luciano Pavarotti are among the notable lovers of the game.

In spite of football being in its fledgling stage during the late-youth and middle age of Rabindranath Tagore, no reference to football is found in any of his prose work; not even in his autobiographical 'Jibonsmriti'. Amazingly enough, Tagore was a good swimmer. He took lessons in wrestling at his ancestral home at Jorasanko in Kolkata. After the publication of the autobiography of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, it's now known to everyone that the supreme architect of independent Bangladesh was a passionate football lover. He also played in local tournaments during his early youth.

Thanks to the continued brightening of the country's status in world cricket, Bangladesh witnesses a marked tilt towards the game. But it cannot break with its past links to football; especially when the whole world remains swamped with a frenzied euphoria over football.

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