IMPHAL:One month! When former FIFA chief Sepp Blatter announced on chill December night in 2013 that the 2017 U-17 World Cup would be held in India, it was difficult to predict what a month away from the tournament would look like. Absolute shambles? FIFA officials running around convincing the local organisers to finish off stadium renovation in time, a-la Brazil? It wasn’t unimaginable considering the Commonwealth Games experience just three years ago.
But with just 30 days left before the kick-off, things couldn’t be more different. It’s not that India has done a spectacular job — no one expected us to be Qatar, finishing stadiums three years before the tournament. But none of the many FIFA officials, who’ve made it to the country over the last couple of months, have had anything bad to say about how things have been going on. Most of the major stadium works were completed only days past the given deadline. Practice pitches were identified and worked on in every centre with surprising ease. Ticket sales, in general, exceeded everybody’s expectations. Spectacular, it might not be, but solid, it definitely is.
As FIFA’s director, player and promotional events, and a player and match agent himself, Miguel Macedo knows a thing or two about the body’s experiences hosting tournaments. “We knew what we were getting into when we accepted their bid for the U-17 World Cup,” he said at an event in Mumbai on Tuesday. “People were actually questioning our decision, but see how it has gone. Most venues are up to date with our regulations, and they have built the necessary infrastructure to hold an event of this magnitude. It will also be something of a legacy, what with facilities now being readily available for future generations, which was one of the biggest things holding football back in India.”‘People were questioning our decision but see how it has gone’.
For the team headed by Javier Ceppi, the struggle, right from day one, was to change the perception of how to hold a sporting event in India. When he went to Kochi and announced that shops in the stadium premises were a security threat, local officials stared at each other in bewilderment. When he insisted that no tickets would be sold on matchdays at stadiums, the local federations, for so long used to people queuing up hours before the game, scratched their heads in confusion. The uncharacteristic smoothness that has characterised this World Cup so far is proof that their approach has paid off.
“We all know this is the FIFA WC event at any level hosted by India,” Macedo said. “What it can also do is perhaps make the country ready to host other FIFA events, like the U-19 and U-20 WC’s. I feel India will do a better job than South Korea, which recently hosted the U-20 WC. There, I felt people weren’t interested that much, and stadiums were never full. That’s not the case here, and I hear that all stadiums have sold out.”
Of course, things could still go wrong. Teams could turn up and tweet pictures of leaky roofs and bald training grounds, complain about being stuck in traffic for hours. But perhaps for the first time in Indian sport, you’d be surprised if things went wrong, rather than the other way round.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com