Sunil Chhetri, one of the greatest footballers that India has produced, recently made an impassioned plea to all the fans of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo — "abuse us, criticise us but please come to watch the Indian national team play."
With less than two weeks left for World Cup football to begin and broadcasters urging fans of the 'beautiful game' to profess their love for their "doosri country" via hashtags, country's all-time highest goal-getter demanded some love and affection for their 'first country'. India, who have improved their ranking to 97 in current Fifa chart, routed Chinese Taipei 5-0 on Friday in the opening game of the four-nation tournament with less than 2000 fans watching from the stands.
Chhetri had a request for all the arm-chair critics of Indian football -- please abuse but make the 'Blue Tigers' feel relevant. "I mean it's not fun to criticise and abuse on internet. Come to the stadium, do it on our face, scream at us, shout at us, abuse us, who knows one day we might change you guys, you might start cheering for us. You guys have no idea how important you guys are and how important your support is," the skipper appealed. (PTI)
Ashwin talked to youngsters on what ails Indian Football...
1) Lack of funding is a main issue in this sport. Huge amount of money is needed in this sport but people are not ready to Fund or sponsor the Indian team due to which they are not able to increase the quality of the game.
Jibin Biju, a student of Trinity college.
2) Lack of media coverage is another problem for football not being popular in India. As if there is a match of the Indian cricket team, it is telecasted in many telivison channels like start sports ,star max etc but if there is match of Indian football team then it is shown in either one TV channel or non of them .Due to this less media coverage in India cricket is preferred more than that of FOOTBALL
Leon Babu, a class 12th student.
3) Guidance is not given to the people who want to play football at a higher level. There are many good players in each state of the country but most of the people have a problem of less guidance. No. of football clubs are also very less compared to that of football.
Shone, a student of Delhi university.
4) In cricket the players get a huge amount of money to play for the team which is a motivation for the players where as the players of football get a minimum amount of money to play in the Indian team due to which people are not interested to divert their courier into football. This problem is just in India, in other countries the players are given a huge amount to play for their team.
Alfin, a class 10th student
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