Junior’s death as reality check

You can lock Paul up and throw away the key — though the police seem to have cleared him — but you will, one, lose a decent goalkeeper and, two, not have done much to prevent similar cases in future. Let’s put his case in perspective. Without endorsing violence on the pitch, it’s important to note that football is a contact sport played out over 90, often highly charged, minutes. At the professional level, it is played by men in their mid-20s, the prime of their youth, who for those 90 minutes psyche themselves up to focus attention, to harness their competitive instincts. There is, in the split second of a full-blooded tackle or (as in this case) a straying hand, a fine line between what is fair, what is a foul and what is completely unacceptable. There will be injury, there will sometimes be tragedy; that’s the nature of the beast.

The difference between professional football as described above and, say, the calcio it sprang from or a schoolyard scrum, is the role played by the governing body. Players are generally kept in line by a well-defined system of cautions, suspensions, fines and other forms of punishment. It is democratic, it is universally applicable and it is what makes football at the highest levels a credible game.

However, its rules, as with any set of laws, are only as good as the people who enforce them. It’s the difference between football in South America and in Europe: the former has the greater natural talent but organised football is riddled with corruption of every sort. In Europe, there is rule of law.

Which brings us back to Subrata Paul. He is as much a creation of his environment as of his own aggression. As a professional footballer, he participates in a sport that is run in the most shambolic, unprofessional manner, surviving — as do most other enterprises in India — on a system of IOUs. The game’s growth over the past decade seems to have caught the All India Football Federation by surprise and it appears unsure of just how to handle things. Today, it is a game with lots of money — top footballers in India earn more than top domestic cricketers — but is not professional. Not in the way it’s played, nor in the way it’s run.

There are three main problems: discipline, health and administration. The first is the immediate context; why was no action taken against Subrata Paul when everyone could see him jumping on the back of an opponent barely a month ago? Federation officials say the referee didn’t complain, nor did the match commissioner. Yet there is something called video evidence by which, last October, Manchester United’s Ruud van Nistelrooy was found guilty, post facto, of a spiteful tackle on an Arsenal defender beyond the referee’s line of vision and suspended for three matches. That Paul got away is nothing new; Indian footballers, especially those from the top clubs, have always got away with bad behaviour on the pitch. One look at any Mohun Bagan-East Bengal match and you’ll see that they play with virtually no fear of official retribution. That is where Paul comes from.

There is another aspect to the Federation’s responsibilities: Players’ health. And not just in terms of pitchside care; enough has been written about that. Playing for much higher stakes than ever before, footballers won’t think twice about pushing their bodies to the extreme. It happens in every sport; you only have to look at the Balco doping case (and, farther back, at Flo-Jo) to see just how far sportsmen are prepared to go. Again, they need to be kept in check. It happens in various ways; through doping tests, through regular, extensive check-ups, through good man-management techniques. Needless to say, it doesn’t happen in India; not in any sport. But football is unique given how it attracts players from abroad, especially from Africa and Brazil. Many of them play illegally, students who’ve simply stayed on or switched fields. For them all, India holds out welcoming, unquestioning arms.

It’s time, though, for those who run the game to be just as questioning as the public is today. They need to recognise that the game’s growth will be on the right lines only when there is some direction, some decision making, some discipline. Only then is there a hope that it will be reflected on the pitch too.