New Delhi: There’s a reason that football is the most played sport in the world. It’s the same reason that the sport is used for extensive development work across the globe.
In Delhi, a bunch of teenage men and women headed to Mexico City to live out their dream emphasises this point. Abhijeet Barse, the Chief Executive of Slum Soccer when asked why they chose football as a medium of inclusion and not any other sport, “It’s simple. Football doesn’t require much. At the start, you need a ball and some space.”
For most of India barring the urban centres, the rules of engagement are possibly the same everywhere. Bricks as posts, three to five a side, imaginary touch lines, goals given only if the ball goes between the posts at a height below the knee, everything else goes. Well, almost everything.
Jyoti Jagat, hailing from the Raipur district of Chattisgarh, had her first foray into football at eight. She will captain the women’s team, that according to its manager Devika Bhagwandas, will aim to finish in the top five after a strong showing in the last edition.
The team, consisting of eight players, from across five states, are good friends according to Jagat and were selected from 24 teams which participated in last year’s Inclusion Cup held in Mumbai.
Slum Soccer, the entity that runs the Inclusion Cup, has come a long way since its inception in 2001. With a movie starring Amitabh Bachchan in the pipeline, a Fifa diversity award and other upgrades such as an artificial turf installed in 2016, things are looking up for the initiative.
After the first step of providing football inclusion to those not touched by the organised sector, the next was to provide quality coaching and development on the social skills of those in the program.
The men’s team finished 18th in the last edition and coach Homkant Surandase hopes for a top-10 finish in Mexico City. Surandase, a former participant in the 2008 edition in Melbourne, explains that the process is not finished with the Homeless World Cup.
“Many take up coaching and go back to their communities to expand the sport to the others. Some take up Sports Quota jobs in the Railways or the Services,” says Surandase, hailing from Yavatmal, Maharashtra.
The soft-spoken Saravanan will lead the men’s team out. The Kerala floods destroyed much of his home, but he is determined to make the most of this opportunity for his mother, a tea plantation worker in Munnar.
Surandase sums up what it means for them to be playing, “For some, it is the stuff of dreams. Playing in a foreign country, staying in a five-star hotel. But they were happy travelling here [to Delhi] by sleeper-class trains. For them, it is about the love of the sport.”
The matches in Mexico will be of seven minutes each, four-a-side. Perhaps, it is a fitting tribute to the way that 90% of the country plays the sport in its remote pockets.