KOLKATA: After his team was comprehensively outplayed in a 5-1 loss by Mali in their round of 16 encounter, Iraq coach Qahtan Al-Rubaye had some loaded compliments for his opponents. "They sometimes look like they are the U-23 team and not the U-17," said Al-Rubaye. "It's quite visible in the way they play. You can't compare (them) with U-17."
Of course, it could be argued that many of these players just fail to evolve in the manner their counterparts in Europe do, and this is precisely what Mali coach Jonas Komla did when he arrived in India for the WC draw in July. "We have some very good players. That is why African teams tend to dominate age-group tournaments," he had told Express then. "But then they go out and they change their mentality, the way they play. They are no longer the same."
Previous editions of the tournament are littered with anecdotes about bitter coaches complaining subtly and otherwise about having to play against players who did not look their age. In 1989, when Saudi Arabia held a Portugal side that had a young Luis Figo to a 2-2 draw, their coach and future Real Madrid manager Carlos Queiroz mischievously said that he would be sent home if he discussed the age of the Saudi players.
FIFA's solution to this problem is to analyse MRI scans of players' wrists. "They decide if a player is overage based on an analysis of the radius bone of the wrist," says Dr Ashok Ahuja, former head of Sports Medicine at NIS Patiala. "If the bone is totally fused, that means, the player is above 17."
In India, FIFA has stepped up its efforts, testing every single player for the first time in competition history. But mystery shrouds what happens to the results or what becomes of the players who fail. FIFA first started testing at the 2009 edition, but no results have ever been made public.
And then, there is the question of whether this method works at all. According to an article in the Scientific American, FIFA based its method on a 2006 study conducted on 500 individuals between the ages of 14-19, from four countries. Critics argue that this is too small a sample size. There are studies that pin the average age of wrist bone fusion between 16-20. FIFA though argues the MRI test has an efficiency of 99%. It is a debate that is impossible to settle. And one that will ignite every time an U-17 World Cup sees a physical team triumph over a better-skilled one.