Ask someone about the football hotbeds of India, and Chandigarh is hardly a name that you would expect on the list. There would be Kolkata with their hundred-year-history of the game, Mizoram and Manipur for the countless players they’ve spawned over the last two decades, Goa and Kerala for keeping Indian football’s flag flying at a time when few others were interested. But Chandigarh?
Yes, Chandigarh may not be on most people’s radar right now, but it surely should be.
Forget the fact that current internationals Gurpreet Singh Sandhu and Robin Singh are from there (another one, Sumeet Passi grew up an hour away from the city). Forget the fact that it is one among the few cities in northern India to host an I-League team. The Chandigarh Football Academy alone should be reason enough.
“If another academy had one player in India’s World Cup-bound U-17 line-up, they would not stop talking about it,” says Sandeep Singh, the academy’s head coach. Four players in the Indian squad for the U-17 World Cup — captain Amarjit Singh, Sanjeev Stalin, Jeakson Singh and goalkeeper Prabhsukhan Gill — have all been training with the academy since they were 10 or so. In its 17-year existence, the CFA has produced a number of national players, including Robin, Daniel Lahlimpuia and Sehnaj Singh.
Yet, there are no signs or posters on the walls of CFA’s office. The only indication that the likes of Daniel and his Bengaluru FC teammate Nishu Kumar learnt to kick a ball here is an aging photograph of the 2010-Subroto Cup winning side. Things are no different for Amarjit & Co. Ask for pics from their time in Chandigarh and Surender Singh, their hostel warden, fishes out from his cupboard a few dozen passport-sized photos.
“They must be in here somewhere,” he remarks. At CFA, they clearly don’t believe in flaunting their success. Maybe it is because they don’t need to. Everything at CFA is paid for by the Chandigarh administration, so it’s not like advertising their success will lead to a financial windfall.
As for the players themselves, they need no reminding of the role that the academy has played in their rise.
Only a few months ago, Nishu dropped in to say hello and ask Surender’s opinion as to where his ailing father should be treated. Then Amarjit called and asked him if arrangements could be made for taking his Class X exams after the World Cup. His schooling had come to an abrupt halt when he was called up for Nicolai Adam’s squad three years ago. “Here, we treat them like family,” remarks Surender. “That is a bond that lasts even after they go away.”
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It’s 4.45pm and a handful of kids are on the field, kicking the ball against a wall and controlling it on its way back. As soon as they notice Sandeep walking in, they run to him, touch his feet and go back to what they were doing. At CFA, the likes of Amarjit and Sanjeev are the past. These kids are the future.
The academy (along with the ones at the same premises that coach cricketers and hockey players) was founded in 2000 at the behest of then Chandigarh administrator JFR Jacob with a pretty simple but revolutionary objective: bring in kids as young as 10 and teach them how to play.
It was an idea that was virtually unheard of back then, and still remains a rarity in Indian football. Even the famed Tata Football Academy, perhaps the most recognised of its ilk, only brings in footballers in their later teens. “This is what makes us so unique and successful,” says Sandeep. “There is perhaps no other football academy in India that brings in players so young and keeps them for so long.”
Once the players are selected — they have to undergo age-verification tests at the nearby hospital — they are with the academy for seven years, unless they fail to progress to a satisfactory level. Two batches of 24 players each run at the same time, meaning trials are held every three-and-a-half years. That makes CFA one of the toughest to get into.
But once a kid gets in, he is taken care of until he is at the cusp of adulthood. “We take care of every single one of their needs,” says Surender. “Their diets are prepared in consultation with a dietician at the Chandigarh General Hospital. Only on Tuesdays do we give them a completely vegetarian diet. We have quotas with three schools in the vicinity. Footballers go to one, hockey players to another and cricketers to the third. We recognise that these kids have unique academic needs; they miss a lot of school playing some tournament or the other. Once they get back, we give them tuition to help them catch up.”
On the field, the kids have a one-hour session in the morning, with another two-hour stretch after school. “When they first come in, we just let them practise for a year,” says Sandeep. “In the second, they play some regional tournaments. The third is for the Subroto Cup U-14 tournament.” And it is in the Subroto Cup, where CFA’s trainees have shown exactly how successful the academy’s methods are.
In 2010, a team involving the likes of Nishu and Daniel emerged champions. The last three years have seen CFA teams finish runners-up, falling twice to the U-14 teams of Bangladesh, and then last year to that of Afghanistan. “All three years, we lost in tie-breaks,” Sandeep says. There is nobody who came in with the U-17 World Cuppers at the CFA right now — their batch proved so successful that they had to be disbanded early. “Almost half of them are with various age-group national teams,” Sandeep says. “So we disbanded them one year early and brought in a new batch.”
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The senior batch at the CFA right now, the kids who came in 2013, know Amarjit, Sanjeev, Jaekson and Sukhan. “Amarjit and Sanjeev were really funny, cracking jokes all the time,” says Pritam, who like the U-17 captain, is from Manipur. “When I came here, staying away from home was hard. It was Amarjit bhai who helped me a lot.” “They’ve promised us a party when they come back after the World Cup,” his statemate Tyson cuts in. “Momo party.”
More than the local kids, it is the likes of Amarjit and Jaekson who form a closer bond with their fellow students. They get to go home once a year for Christmas. For the rest of the seven long years, fellow kids at the academy are their family. Former national player Harjinder Singh was the coach when the four of them entered the academy in 2011. “At that time, it was impossible to predict where they would end up. They were so small. But you could see that they had qualities which set them apart. Sanjeev, for example, is a really smart player. He is small in stature, but his intelligence makes up for that.”
Harjinder also remembers the ordeal Jaekson had to go through. “He was not initially part of the team, although he was better than most of them. The reason was that the then-coach (Nicolai Adam) believed he was too big for his age.
“We tried to convince him by saying that we had done all the necessary tests to verify his age and that he had experienced a growth spurt while he was with us. But Nicolai did not take him.”
The rejection took a heavy toll on Jaekson who, as his mates in CFA remember, already wore his emotions on his sleeve.
Then he went along with Minerva Punjab FC’s U-17 team to play the World Cup-bound group last year, and caught the attention of new coach Luis Norton de Matos in just an hour of play. Nobody at CFA was surprised. That was how well they had brought Jaekson up.
On a wall at the CFA’s sprawling football ground, something is written that every kid sees every time they run out to train: “I am the greatest”. In a few days, four of them will have the opportunity to put those very words to test. Against the best in the world.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com