Going just by the number of countries he has played football in, it is obvious that Delhi Dynamos’ Kean Lewis is a prodigious talent. Born in 1992, Lewis has already secured a training stint at Premier League champions Leicester City, enjoyed a short stay at a Mexican club and earned the Best Player of the Season award in an United States university team before winning the Federation Cup with Indian club Mohun Bagan.
This year, he has improved even more, currently leading the charts among domestic players in the Indian Super League with four goals, despite not being deployed as a striker.
It all started back in 2005, when Lewis was part of the Premier Indian Football Academy in Mumbai and courtesy the academy’s tie-ups with major foreign clubs, was invited for a training stint in Leicester, who had recently signed a deal with I-League side East Bengal also.
After a short stay -where he practiced with both the U-14 and U-16 teams, he was offered a berth in the academy team – an unprecedented achievement for a young Indian footballer. However, there was an obvious hurdle to his path.
From Leicester to the United States to Mexico
“Being a minor, I couldn’t migrate alone and my family had to go there with me. It was too big a risk to take back then and we decided that I would be playing in India for the time being,” Lewis told Scroll during a conversation before the start of the season.
In Mumbai, he changed sides soon, being drafted into the Mahindra United youth team, where he had former India international Santosh Kashyap as his coach and fledgling players like Karan Sawhney and Collin Abranches as his teammates.
He was later admitted to the Tata Football Academy at Jamshedpur, under the insistence of Ranjan Chowdhury but left for the United States to join a course in Sports Management at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
This decision to move for greener pastures changed his career forever. While he soon became a regular at the university team, Kean also got a chance to train with Houston Hurricanes whose owner cum head coach Brendan Keyes was impressed with his potential.
Lewis went on to play for the Hurricanes for one full season before appearing for a trial with Major League Soccer side Houston Dynamos’ Under-23 team, where he was one of the two players selected from almost 250 candidates. While he honed his skills under the tutelage of UEFA A-licensed coach James Clarkson, he also doubled up as a guide for the youth programmes of the club.
During his stay at the outfit, he was spotted by a Mexican scout and went on to play for Mexican club Inter Acapulco for a month before returning to USA to complete the paperwork.
However, Inter shut shop during this period and Lewis had to be content by continuing at Dynamos where a change in personnel in summer did not help his cause either. He was then roped in by another Mexican club Laredo Heat which is owned by India-born businessman Sashi Vaswani.
Sparkling at home
After he returned to India following the completion of the course, Mohun Bagan were the club that came up with the most convincing deal in 2015 and joining the defending I-League champions was a no-brainer for Kean. Soon after joining the club on trial, he scored a brace in a practice match, thereby winning the confidence of the coach.
“I had heard that he can play on the wings. I had told him that we have issues in our striking department and I want to see him as a striker. He has the speed and peripheral vision,” Sanjoy Sen, the coach of the Kolkata team, had remarked after the match.
However, by the time the I-League had started, the Mariners already had Jeje Lalpekhlua, Cornell Glen and Balwant Singh up front while Sony Norde and Yusa Katsumi marshalled the flanks. Lewis, who had played as both a winger and a striker in his career, slipped down the pecking order, managing only three starts in the top-flight competition.
All these look like a thing of the past now with the Mumbai lad growing in confidence at the Delhi Dynamos. His tally of four goals is only a small part of the overall improvement he has put on display in the last six weeks.
He has looked extremely comfortable in possession, an attribute seldom found among Indian footballers. Kean’s immaculate decision-making, neat passing in the opponent third and occasional forays into the penalty box make him a very intelligent footballer overall, who is very hard to be kept at bay.
While he does not possess electrifying pace or eye-catching trickery on the flanks, his ability to hold the ball under extreme pressure has come out as his biggest strength.
After the turn of the decade, Indian football has not found any midfielder who can consistently score goals, with the lone exception being Lalrindika Ralte. Accustomed to playing in both wings and as a lone forward, the 24-year old winger can fill the void if he is nurtured well and is given the minimum time required to prosper.
For now, Kean Lewis looks set to be a regular starter for Mohun Bagan after the end of the glitzy league, but for him, the focus will be on carving a niche for him in the national team.
