Eight Hisar village girls in Indian football squad

Gaurav Kanthwal

Eight girls from Sadalpur village of Hisar district have made it to the 23-member Indian squad for the SAFF U-15 women’s football championship to be played at the Changlimithang Stadium in Thimphu, Bhutan, till August 19.

Manisha, Kavita, Poonam, Anju, Ritu, Kiran, Nisha and Varsha have made the cut in the squad announced by the All India Football Federation recently.

Anju, daughter of a driver,  is a forward who scored 18 goals in the Sub-Junior National Championship in Cuttack recently.  She scored almost half of the goals for her team in the tournament. Anju was also adjudged the best player of the tournament in the girls’ U-14 category National School Games in Sagar, MP, in 2016. She had scored 30 out of 62 goals in the tournament. Goalkeeper Manisha was adjudged the best goalkeeper of the tournament in the 2016 School Nationals. Manisha also comes from a humble background. Her father is a daily wage worker and barely manages to eke out a living for his family. Kavita’s mother works as a farm labour, as her father died early when Kavita was barely two years’ old. Most of the girls come from a very humble background and football is not only their passion but also a ticket to good life.

There are close to 35 girls in and around Sadalpur who train under coach Vinod Loyal at the Vinod Football Academy at Chuli Bagrain. Some of the girls from nearby villages have to cycle 15 km to train at the Chuli Bagrain ground. The ground where the girls train has come up after the village panchayat made arrangements for the girls who had no place to train. Coach Vinod used to train them at Sadalpur village on a land adjoining a cemetery. 

“I started coaching in 2003 when I was still playing. I would myself practise in the morning and train girls exactly the same way in the evening,” he says.

Since the majority of population there is from the Bishnoi community, which bury their dead, the training of the girls was to be called off whenever there was a death in the village.

The girls have been doing well consistently on the national stage but curiosly haven’t represented their parent state, Haryana, as much as they should have, given their exceptional results. In 2014, as many as 25 players (U-14 and U-17) from Sadalpur shifted base to Chandigarh and represented a school there in the School Nationals. 

The coach claims that the girls were overlooked in the state trials for the 2014 Nationals. In 2018, the girls shifted to Himachal Pradesh and finished third after losing to Manipur in the semifinals of the U-14 Sub-Junior National Championship. Interestingly, eight of the girls were selected for the India camp from there and they made it to the squad.

“I had a bunch of eight to 10 girls who were really good at the national stage but Haryana Football Association officials said they could accommodate only two of them. Where would I send the rest of the girls? So, I thought it is better to shift to a place where the girls had a better chance of making it to the national team,” says Loyal.