Savour football, minus nationalism

Rohit Mahajan

SPORT, war minus the shooting, has and always will cause enmity and rancour. In our times of hyper-connectivity, we’ve got vicious trolling, too. It often gets very weird — Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, recently trolled the Indian cricket team for only its second 10-wicket loss in the T20 World Cups, the first being the one handed out by Pakistan last year in the UAE. This is how hyper-nationalism warps the minds of even those in high positions.

Mercifully, after the tamasha of the T20 World Cup, in which the two finalists were teams that had earlier been beaten by Zimbabwe and Ireland, we’ve got real sport — the football World Cup. Don’t get me wrong — T20 cricket is sport, too, but it’s so much abbreviated that it bridges the skill-gap between the greatest and the modestly-gifted cricketers. The useful-but-undazzling Brad Evans can outdo the sublime Babar Azam; with a bit of luck, the unheralded Dubliner Andy Balbirnie can shame the likes of Jos Buttler, Alex Hales, Dawid Malan, Ben Stokes, Liam Livingstone of England. In cricket, in the long run, only the best win — in the short run, everyone has a chance.

Back to football. Mercifully for us laggards in India, the football World Cup can be enjoyed without much emotional turmoil. Brazil and Argentina, it’s true, have inspired deep-rooted loyalties in India, dating back to the days when Indians, subjugated by the British, liked watching teams from former colonies beating the Europeans. Brazil, with its array of black, brown and white players, playing with beauty and evident joy, beating the Europeans and becoming world champions three times from 1958 to 1970, was inspirational. To our country, bewilderingly diverse and yet united, the mixed Brazilian team was a great metaphor for unity in diversity. Maradona’s magic in the 1986 World Cup — the first such tournament watched by India after the advent of colour TV and rapid creation of TV relay infrastructure — made Argentina a favourite, too.

The one blessing of city-based sports leagues is that they encourage inter-mingling, discourage toxic nationalism. For instance, in the first IPL, Shoaib Akhtar was a hit with Kolkata Knight Riders, Sohail Tanvir was loved by Rajasthan Royals. Lasith Malinga was celebrated in Mumbai. Conversely, Indian players were heckled — Virat Kohli, Ajit Agarkar, Yuvraj Singh were booed in Mumbai, playing against Mumbai Indians, even as the crowd chanted ‘Maalingaa, Maalingaa’ when the Sri Lankan steamed in to bowl.

When fans choose their teams for reasons other than their country, they become intensely partisan, too. This has happened in India increasingly in the past few decades, after satellite TV brought action from Europe’s football grounds straight to our living rooms. Several years ago, one started overhearing weird conversations among young people regarding ‘my’ team in Europe. ‘We didn’t go into the match with the right XI,’ a colleague in a Delhi newspaper would say about an Italian Serie A match involving his favourite team, Juventus. A follower of Arsenal, who had mastered the French pronunciation of Thierry Henry — awn-rae — but would revert to ‘hen-ri’ in excitement, would say things like: ‘Our plans are a mess... Arsene Wenger (manager) should be sacked!’

India’s football fans who support international teams or clubs are akin to stateless persons, owned by none and derided and even reviled by many. But they could claim to be true lovers of the sport. They can claim that they love football for the sake of football, not for feelings roused by considerations such as patriotism, ethnicity, language or religion.

It’s a mystery why any Indian fan would idolise England’s football team, yet such people exist. Some of them besieged the elite hotel in which the English players are staying in Qatar. They blew trumpets and banged drums and chanted the England fans’ war cry: ‘It’s coming home.’ Whose home?

Sadly, or hilariously, they were called ‘fake’ fans, paid by the local authorities to pretend to be fans of various teams. One allegedly fake England fan said: ‘We are diehard England fans. My favourite player was Beckham, but now it is Saka. If someone offered to pay us to support England, we would turn them down. We are genuine supporters. Many of us grew up watching Beckham and Michael Owen. Our love is to this team.’

This begs the question — will the love of the Indian football fan ever be to the Indian football team? As we’ve seen in the case of boxing, wrestling and shooting, fans will throng to support an Indian team if it does well in international competitions. Alas, the hope of the Indian football team excelling in Asian — let alone global! — football is flimsy. India is ranked No. 19 in Asia, from where five teams (South Korea, Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) are part of this year’s World Cup. To get into the top-five in Asia is only a dream, and a very distant one, for now. The sad part is that India was among the top guns in Asia once, winning the Asian Games gold in 1951 and 1962, the bronze in 1970. The Indian team finished fourth in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, second in the 1970 Asian Championship.

Then the slide happened, due to lack of vision and planning, even while the other Asian countries pumped money in football. Asia’s top football-playing countries are rich, higher than India on all development indexes. It can be surmised that the countries of Africa, poorer than us, are superior in football due to some X-factor — a genetic or racial advantage? American athlete Michael Johnson once said: ‘Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me — I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.’ Could this be true?

Putting all that aside, we in India can simply enjoy the treat the planet’s most talented players will put up over the next four weeks. For the World Cup in Qatar, we can be multi-partisan lovers of football, free from various kinds of nationalism. 

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