KOCHI: “Football is my life and breath. The thing about the game is how much ever you starve, you don’t know hunger when you play,” says Walter Antony, standing under the shade of a tree on the sidelines of the FACT Ground in Eloor. The veteran footballer and coach completed 30 eventful years in the football field.
Even though it has been three decades since Walter was picked up in the professional football circuit, his tryst with the ball game began much earlier. Say, since childhood. “Having played football throughout my childhood on the sandy beach at Valiyathura in Thiruvananthapuram, I only began playing on a grass field towards the end of my school days. My older brother Gabriel Rajan, who now plays for a football club owned by an MNC in Bahrain, was my first coach,” he says.
While playing for a local club in Thiruvananthapuram, he was selected as one of the 20 young players to be taken into FACT’s training programme in 1989. This changed the trajectory of a young Walter’s life. “I was 18 years old and was part of FACT’s pilot football training project. The team was trained by T K S Mani, under whose captaincy Kerala won its first-ever Santhosh Trophy in 1973, and Simon Sundararaj, who scored a goal for India against Peru in the 1960 Rome Olympics,” says Walter.
The footballer, who shifted roots to Eloor to pursue his football dreams, then went on to play for the FACT team for 15 years. “The team played and won against all major football teams in the state,” he says. During this time, Walter played for the Kerala team in Santhosh Trophy in 1991 and for Ernakulam team from 1991 to 1994. “I was the youngest player in the state team. I M Vijayan was the captain of the team. As for the Ernakulam team, I was captain once,” he says.
Even after the FACT team died a slow death, Walter decided to play on. “That’s when I got into coaching,” he says. For six years, the footballer informally coached the children who came to play at the FACT ground. “It wasn’t anything serious,” he says. In 2013, under his leadership, a football academy for aspiring players was started. “The academy - christened F F Academy - trains children from the grassroots level and now has an I-League under-13 team,” he says.
The academy has churned out a number of players into national and international football clubs.
Walter’s football craze is not just limited to himself. His sons 17-year-old Alphin and 16-year-old Alen have already made themselves known in the football field.