Beyond The Goal

Friday must have been astonishingly a great day for Sunil Chhetri. For us in India, I am sure, we will be keeping a tab on Kansas City Wizards in the coming days. Just like we did for Baichung Bhutia almost a decade back when he had turned out for Bury FC in England. A day after this significant move by Chhetri to MLS, here comes a stunner from Delhi where Chhetri was born, brought up and made his debut with City Club. I took a stroll down the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg and landed up at the Ambedkar Stadium where two local teams (New Delhi Heroes and Simla Youngs) were engaged in a I-League second division match. I thought the local association (DSA) would be all geared-up to cash in on the good news. Let me recount the step by step account of what transpired on the Saturday afternoon at the Ambedkar Stadium, a day after Chhetri was officially presented by KCW in MLS. On the dais, I found some DSA and some club officials caught up with some mundane discussions. One of them requested me t...

Twice I had to dump the idea of going to the refurbished National Stadium to watch a World Cup. I was a tad disappointed. Not because I couldn't watch a single World Cup game at home but Indian team's early ouster was highly discouraging. I wanted to watch Jose Brasa-trained Indian team. I wanted to follow another national team coached by a foreigner. Post World Cup, the media has done lot of incisive and indepth reasoning behind Indian team's failure in the World Cup. But apart from the technical aspect, none of the writers wrote about the ground realities. Look at Australia. Just a couple of years back we shown the door to Aussie Ric Charlesworth. Back at the helm as Australia's chief coach, this man has produced some outstanding result. Here we made a mistake. We should have allowed the expert (Ric) to do his duty as Indian hockey's chief advisor. He would have done a decent job, I am sure. Here the Indian hockey administrators made a huge mistake. Lot of people ...