The Priority Game...

Today’s Times of India has a nice “A thought for today”.

FIFA has 207 members; we have only 191.

– Kofi Annan.

This tells a lot about the popularity of the Football.

Even in country like ours this world cup fever has significant impact.

In a “Mad for cricket” country like ours, Since last so many days one rarely comes across a discussion about the recent test series between India and West Indies. I won’t even dare to comment about attention given to Azalan Shah Trophy where we were at third place.

The common discussion now a day is of course about Football... The priority game…

Last Friday… Evening…We had four sports events going on in parallel…two crickets matches Sri Lanka vs. England & India vs. West Indies, then Wimbledon and the World cup quarter final between England and Portugal.

Frankly speaking both the cricket matches were damn interesting, India wound up the Windies for 103... and Sri Lanka chased the target of 321 in just about 39 overs.

I don’t remember Wimbledon matches but even those beautiful gals playing out there could not distract our attention as usual….

We simply found ourselves selecting the England vs. Portugal match above all these distractions.

I found that it is an easy activity to watch these football world cup matches than cricket. Since India is not there, there is no tension about loosing so we can enjoy the match for sheer quality of the game.

But this also raises a serious question about the quality of sports in our country. When these poor African countries like Ghana can enter the knock out round; a so called developing country with a population of over a billion can not even quality for the world cup.

Current Ranking of Indian Football team is 117!!!!!!!

There are two main reasons for this I guess…. First one is that in our society Playing is not looked upon in a good prospect. If we look around then we find that children are discouraged from concentrating on sports.

The second reason I see is that cricket has acted as a predator for all other games in this country. Only the cricket players are admired… because of this only they get all the sponsorships… and everything. I won’t blame the sponsor companies because after all they are here for business.

Look at the number of well-known people in other sports… Few hockey players (Thanks to PHL….) and a few others like Vishavanathan Anand, Baichung Bhutia or Sania Mirza, Rajyavardhan Rathod… we don’t even have handful of players to name from other sports.

No wonder we are no where in the Olympics either…