“We could only fund money for five air tickets as of now. The Spanish club has also expressed its interest to take in some of our players to the International Football Academy if they put on an impressive showing at the tournament,” Ebin Rose, coach of Kovalam FC and a Santosh Trophy winner with Kerala, told Express.
The tournament is scheduled for kickoff on April 17 and it may well throw open the doors of the prestigious club-- that have produced footballers for the youth sides of Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid-- to the kids from Kovalam.
Although their chances of making it on a flight to Spain before the appointed date appear rather bleak at the moment, Ebin says the team officials are trying their best to raise funds for the overseas trip.
“We will keep doing what we know and hope that someone will turn up with support based purely on our merits,” the KFC coach adds optimistically.
It was Tony Langham,a Briton,who took the initiative to form a club, during a visit to the idyllic tourist hotspot in 2009. Soon after, the nearby areas of Vizhinjam, Venganoor and Kovalam itself witnessed a surge in the footballing activities, which was earlier restricted to Valiyathura and Vettukad along the coast.
Besides Tony, Ebin; coach S Geevarghese; former Viva Kerala star Patrick Sisupalan and G Sudheesh Kumar, were the others, who pitched in with the efforts, to realise the KFC dream. In the beginning, KFC had only 20 budding footballers on its rolls. And the team, which opened an academy in 2011, now provides training to over 80 players in the Under-12, Under-16 and Under-19 teams.
“One of our players signed up for the AG’s Office last year and we have five from our team in the district Under-21 side for the state championships starting next week,” says Ebin, while speaking of the tremendous strides the club has made.
Indian football team’s technical director Rob Baan, who was here in October, had also given a glowing endorsement of KFC’s activities.