KOLKATA: As the noise was dying down after the Brazil-England game, one of the LOC members sat down in the empty press room and muttered to himself — three more days to go.
It seems like yesterday that Narendra Modi walked out and shook the hands of the Indian team on the opening day, but the World Cup is almost done. Now all that’s left is the mandatory pre-match activities on Friday and the final itself on Saturday. And what has been astonishing is just how smoothly the entire tournament has gone ahead.
Yes, there was that shifted semi-final, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Few would argue that this tournament would be anything but a success, as the stats speak for themselves.
On Thursday, FIFA’s director of tournaments Jaime Yarza had perhaps the most impressive number of the tournament so far. “Going by advance ticket sales for the final, India is set to overtake, not only the record for the most attended U-17 World Cup set by China in 1985, but also the one set by the most attended U-20 World Cup,” he said.
Think about that! The most attended U-20 World Cup was the one held in Colombia in 2011, where 1,309,929 turned up to watch the likes of Antoine Greizmann, James Rodriguez, Phil Coutinho, Isco and Coke — all two or three years away from joining a big European side. Compared to that, the ‘big names’ that turned up in India were few and far in between — the likes of Jadon Sancho, Angel Gomez and Jann-Fiete Arp are recongisable but nowhere near big ticket now. Yet a staggering 1,224,027 have turned up so far, with two games left.
Behind the scenes, the tournament has gone even better than its director Javier Ceppi had hoped. “When I came to India after taking up the assignment, the first word that I learnt was jugaad,” Ceppi said. “For me, that word reflected all that we did not want to do. The culture of getting things done at the last minute, that we had to do away with.”
“We visited all the cities and knew it was going to be a lot of work. Like any other World Cup, it had its challenges. But the amount of goodwill and energy that different stakeholders have applied has been amazing. You’ve seen the transformation of facilities. All the stadiums are much better. We’ve created 26 training grounds almost from scratch.”
The first major blip came towards the end when the semi-final in Gauhati was shifted to Kolkata at the last minute. But even there, Ceppi maintains, little else could have been done. “The reality is that no ground would have been able to withstand the rain that had happened,” he said. “It was built to all necessary specifications. But the damage to the ground was so much. If a pitch is damaged, you can recover it in a week. But when you have three days, and it rains again, there is nothing you can do.”
India always stood to gain a lot from this event — opportunity for the players, an upgrade in infrastructure, a group of organisers who know how to deliver a major tournament and a sense of hype around the game. But the biggest short-term gain appears to be the amount of goodwill, the smooth conduct of this tournament had generated within FIFA. Friday will see Kolkata host a meeting of the all-powerful FIFA council, with all the big names in world football from Gianni Infantino to Fatma Samoura assembling here.
And at this meeting, AIFF president Praful Patel will make a pitch for another FIFA tournament —the U20 World Cup.
“You could do it tomorrow,” was Yarza’s reply when he was asked if India was ready to host the U-20 World Cup. “The stadiums here are almost senior World Cup stadiums.”
An inflated compliment, that may be, but India can take that as a pat on the back.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com