Nerve Endings Firing Away

The Greeks came from nowhere and stunned the soccer world with their astonishing run at the recently-concluded Euro 2004. After wild-card entry Denmark won it all couple of years back, the Euro championship has become a breeding ground for nurturing previously unheralded nations. It can almost become a movie — Football: a true underdog story. Err; wait; there is already a movie like that this summer.

Underdogs may win at the Euro but we never won it in our times. Having played soccer for my school and college teams, we hardly ever won anything and were primarily known for some awesome walloping by much stronger rivals. Guess we were too geeky and preoccupied with laws of physics and calculating bending moments to bend the ball like Beckham.

But nevertheless I had my share of fun and painful memories on the soccer field. Trained by a state-level soccer coach for few weeks, I realized the torturous path of having a soccer life. On the first day, our coach (Saala John!) flung me at least a dozen feet away by a slight shoulder push and I kept a serious distance from him after that. I guess, I didn’t have it in my genes to make it big in soccer.

If I had a Christian name like D’Souza or Fernandes and played for one of those uppity Convents like Don Bosco or St. Stanislaus, I would have been a force to reckon with. But my brother did end up playing in Belgium for one of the local leagues and later for his college in India so my name and gene-deficient excuse doesn’t hold.

One memorable losing incident was against our match with St. Josephs’ (why do Christian sounding schools play better ball is sometimes beyond me). The buggers walloped us 7-0 and we were proud of the fact that the margin wasn’t greater. The ball never left our half and our poor goalie rued the day he ever signed up for the team. He must have touched the ball more than ten of us combined. The sole incident when he was spared that trouble too was when the damned Joseph-ite penalty-corner nicely curled into our goal. We gave up officially after that goal and were content with kicking the ball outside the boundary.

We did have our moments of victory too. Yup, there were other geeky schools in the Greater Bombay region to give us company or at least momentary cheerful memories. Whilst in undergrad college, we encroached upon a sister-concern school’s mucky playground and abandoned our T-squares for a change.

Soccer in India has a thumb-rule — more the field resembles an Amazonian swamp, more ideal are the conditions to play some ball. Often we were caught kicking the poor ball deeper into the muck; the entire team had descended in the same puddle of gooey mud until we all resembled identical mud “decatuplets”. The fact that the ball was lying silently, watching the tamasha a dozen feet away merits a mention. Washing up after a game always took longer than the game itself. We weren’t allowed inside the school but thankfully had a miniscule tap under which we all huddled.

Oh yeah! Talking about victories, which came as rare as French military victories, was mostly against engineering skinnies. One time, when we weren’t scoring enough our captain hollers “take that bastard down; foul him. I don’t care if you get a red card gift wrapped”. Fair play took a convenient back seat as our game slowly began resembling a bloody brawl. The opposing team finally lost nerve and allowed us to pound in the goals.

It is true. Guys play to win, hook or by crook; even if it is a neighborhood lagoree match.