Gali Gali Football Shootball

Following matches through radio static to plugging in—Indian fans have been steadfast as ever. But has the dazzle of European soccer held us in enthralled stupor?

- Siddhartha Mishra

IF you keep faith in the Beautiful Game, the FIFA World Cup would arrive every four years as manna from heaven, a cornucopia that is soul food as well as sensual indulgence. While Indian football fans have not thrown up a team their countrymen could root for, they have absorbed, nay inhered, world football through the decades. The nature of fandom has changed too—from those who fought over broadsheets to read about ‘what happened last night’ to those who can now plug a pair of earphones into their smartphones and transport themselves into a live game. Football has been changing too, with the technology revolution laying its hand on the techni­ques of football, as on everything else. Yet, in its essence, it’s still what a lay observer will say it is: 22 individuals on a lush field running after a leather orb.

It is not that simple though, isn’t it? The origins of provincial partisanship are layered eno­ugh. The Indian fan from Bengal always had the ‘big three’ of East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting to expend their energy on, though greats like Hungary’s Ferenc Puskas were also celebrated. With the dwindling of Indian footballing prowess on the world stage from the ’60s, the fan’s association with the game has gone through a radi­cal shift. Experts believe the game­changer in the post­War World Cup era to be the allure of watching Maradona running defences ragged in Mexico on colour TV in 1986. “It started in 1958, with Pele and Garrincha,” says football writer Novy Kapadia. He says that prior to that the WC had been won by “predominantly White teams” and the common belief was that “Blacks don’t have the temperament to last a full world cup”, something that was said about the West Indies cricket team of that era as well. “Brazil shattered that.”