It’s only eight in the morning but NEROCA FC are already halfway through their practice session at the Maibakhul village ground. Far from Imphal city, a full 13km away, Maibakhul is less of a football pitch and more of an open ground, surrounded by paddy fields and hills.
To get there, one has to get off what the locals call ‘the Nagaland highway’ — the only road connecting the state to its neighbour, subject so often to crippling blockades — and take a long, picturesque deviation along a narrow semi-tarred path that would be clogged if two vehicles try crossing at the same time. It is perhaps this anonymity that persuaded NEROCA — a couple of months away from being the state’s first ever I-League team — to choose Maibakhul as their training base.
But then, this is Manipur. It’s only eight in the morning but NEROCA’s training session already has an audience, a handful of school kids, all 10 or below, half-zipped bags over their backs. They stand at the gate, waiting for a stray ball to roll their way so that they can pass it back to their heroes. The team bus driver reminds them of school. That can wait, they reply. There’s nothing novel about kids missing a class to watch a game of football, but in Manipur, that has a whole different meaning.
Here that’s the best education, they will receive. A lot may have changed in Manipur, but one thing remains the same — the easiest way out of the state, of toiling for a lifetime on the fields that their fathers and grandfathers endured. Become a footballer. Play your way out of trouble. Perhaps that’s why, whether it be Jackichand Singh or Udanta Singh, you sometimes notice an instinctive tendency to run through the defence rather than knock it back. That’s how they got there in the first place.
That’s what most of the Singhs in Indian football have done — Surkumar, Renedy, Gouramangi, Thoi, Udanta, Jackichand, Seityasen, the list goes on. That’s what a bunch of youngsters in India’s first ever World Cup-bound squad are doing — Manipur has contributed more players in it than other states.
Take a walk around Imphal and there will be one recurring theme to almost every conversation you have — things are much better these days. Sure, there are the endless blockades, army curfews, threats from insurgents and, even if all these other issues cease to exist, the geographical isolation that will always prevent it from ever being fully integrated with the mainland. Imphal, in spite of all this, strikes you as city in a hurry to get somewhere. The markets bustle with activity and a building seems to be rising up, whichever direction you turn to.
Outside the capital though, Manipur remains, perhaps as it was, a hundred years ago, fields, hills and everything. A dominating chunk of the state’s $2.5 billion gross domestic product comes from agriculture and forest produce. Most of everything else is centered around Imphal.
It is from these villages that a lot of Manipur’s footballers arise, with one singular ambition — get out and earn. “I’ve got players,” says Naoba Thangjam, the young businessman masterminding NEROCA’s rise to the top of Indian football.
“They all come from the villages, their parents are farmers and whatever they earn playing football is the most they’ll make. But when it’s harvest season, they have to go back and work on the fields.”
“Manipur is not an industrial centre or an IT hub,” he says. “This is the one chance they have.”
Subhash Singh is not your stereotypical Manipuri footballer, in that he did not come out of extreme poverty.
“My father was a government servant, so we were, what you would call, middle-class,” he says. “But I still looked upon football as a chance to have a better life. I had a cousin, Samson, who played for Air India and took me for trials there. Now the kids in my village look at me and want to take the same path out. And I try help them get trials wherever I can.”
Subhash is 27, but his resume already boasts of a long line of clubs — East Bengal, Mohun Bagan, Salgaocar, Pune FC, Shillong Lajong, Mumbai City FC and now NEROCA. For hundreds of his statemates, the journey is as long, even if the stops are not as impressive.
“The Manipur State League is held in the first half of the season, during the months of September and October,” says RK Momocha, who runs Sagolband United, one of most storied clubs in the league.
“A lot of players, when the league is done here, venture down south to places where the state or city leagues happen during the second half of the season — Chennai, Bengaluru, Kerala. Last year, I loaned out a number of players to clubs in these leagues. The money they make is lower than what they’d make with us, but it’s still a sizeable amount.”
But how does Manipur keep endlessly churning out footballers? They lack access to proper coaching that players in Mumbai or Bengaluru will get. Unlike the similar success story of Mizoram, they do not have a proactive state body holding the reins efficiently (the association could do a lot more, Momocha repeatedly points out). Passion would be an answer, but that’s there in West Bengal and Goa.
The other important keyword is a necessity. For a lot of Manipur youngsters, becoming a footballer is a necessity. Backing that theory up is rapidly-urbanising Imphal where at least some kids can dream of becoming doctors and engineers. Both Naoba and Momocha, with their Imphal-based teams, say there is hardly anyone from the city playing for them.
“When I was a kid, I would just venture out every morning onto the nearby ground and start playing with whoever was there,” says Gouramangi Singh, one of the last great footballers to come out of the Imphal suburbs.
“But now when I go back there, there are a lot less players. Kids these days are more interested in playing video games.”
Imphal, though, retains one of the most vibrant footballing setups in place anywhere in the country today — more than fifty clubs operate in the city. And for fodder, these clubs venture out into the hills and villages where the game still is life. “Some of the best talent in the country, you’ll find in the hills,” Momocha says.
“The infrastructure is basic. A field with goalposts. But every team is based around a ground, a group of kids, with elders to guide them. They may lack the infrastructure that is there in Imphal, but the passion is unrivalled.”
It is these villages that have given five players to Stephen Constantine’s most recent India squad and contributed nine to Luis Norton de Matos’ U-17 World Cup-bound group. And all they’ve taken to do it is a field with goalposts at either ends and a bunch of kids playing in it.
vishnu,prasad@newindianexpress.com