Goal, interrupted

Ratanbala Devi shot the ball off the crossbar and into Nepal’s goalpost, sending the spectators into a collective eruption. Goaaaaaal! At the first ever Hero Gold Cup football tournament for women, held last month in Bhubaneswar’s Kalinga Stadium, host India needed to fight back 0-2 in its match against Nepal. Nepal won; India went out of the cup, 2-1. Indian coach Maymol Rocky, the seventh person to coach the Indian women’s team and the first woman to hold the post, screamed from the sidelines, as the women jostled on the field.

Across India, women coaches are helping young girls kick up a storm. This was evident in Mapusa, Goa, where 80 women footballers and their coaches had gathered for an eight-day international women’s football festival in August 2017. Discover Football, a Berlin-based volunteering organisation, had brought over a dozen remarkable women coaches from around the globe to share their expertise.

These teenage girls had fought relatives, neighbourhoods, and district- and state-level apathy simply to be able to kick a ball around; they fought gender stereotyping, pulled themselves up through their sport, and used it to raise awareness about sex-based harassment, violence and rights. They earned their livelihoods playing football. Ask them who inspires them, and they’ll point to their guardian angels — their coaches, including many young players who chose to train the new batches and keep the ball rolling, like 25-year-old Bangalorean Anitha Raju.

Anitha’s father drives an autorickshaw and mother stitches clothes for a living, and there was a time the family was ostracised because Anitha played football. Today, she’s a certified professional coach who trains schoolchildren, besides giving free training to needy players.

The coach was drawn to football as a 13-year-old. A regional NGO had collaborated with a neighbourhood social organisation to train slum children in sports, arts and life skills. Anitha wanted to play football but was told it was “only for boys”. For months she argued and pleaded with the coordinators until, one day, the team coach finally handed her the ball. She promptly scored a goal and found a place in the team, but only unofficially.

Kenyan coach Everlyne Anyango Ochieng (in blue) also educates her team about reproductive rights

“The boys teased me, saying I should go home and do the chores... I replied that I’ll be here every day until they remember that I am a footballer,” Anitha reminisces. Friends, family members, and even the coordinators never failed to remind her that “girls don’t play football; they don’t brush against the boys in the field; young girls don’t wear shorts in public”. She decided to ignore them all. When the boys in her team wouldn’t ever pass the ball her way, she learned to snatch it from their feet.

At 15, she was selected to play for the State Under-16 team. “This required me to train under the state coach, twice a week, at a venue 20 km from home.” Changing two buses and walking the rest of the way, she ended up returning late every day, only to set tongues wagging in her neighbourhood. One evening, she missed a bus and had to walk all the way home, arriving well after dinner time. Her mother shut the door on her. “Quit football if you have to live with us,” she was told.

It took a lot of pleading before her parents finally relented. “My parents tried to support me, but societal pressure, the hurtful comments of people were too much for them to handle,” she tells BL ink during the football festival in Goa. Her grandmother stopped talking to her. “It’s been a decade. My parents are not invited to family gatherings, and they constantly hear tart comments because I play ‘a man’s game shamelessly’.”

This kind of ostracisation is not specific to the country, suggests Lea Gölnitz, the project coordinator of Discover Football in India. She shares her experience of organising football events in various countries of Europe, West Asia and Africa. “This discrimination is everywhere. If you ‘re thinking that it’s easy for the Berlin girls playing football in Europe, you will be mistaken. They might be enjoying better infrastructure, but they have to put up with similar unfairness and negligence,” she says.

Women coaches are hard to come by in football. “Coaches double as mentors and constantly inspire you to keep fighting your battles,” says Farheen. She and her gang of football playing girls in Mumbra, Maharashtra, call themselves the Parcham Collective. “When we started playing, we had no coach. We learned from YouTube,” Farheen says. Their present coach comes twice a week, commuting four hours both ways. The players decided to form a collective as they saw it as a way to strengthen their right to use a public place safely and with dignity.

Echoing this view is Jyoti Ann Burrett, the charismatic national footballer who floated the Delhi Women’s Football Players Welfare Association in 2017 to gain hassle-free access to public space.“Society as a whole hasn’t yet come to terms with the idea of women playing football, as they are still expected to perform gender-specific roles. The mindset intensifies further as we continue to rebel,” adds Aquila Khan, a member of Parcham.

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For Anitha, things changed for the better once her family realised that she could make a livelihood out of the game. Initially she found a part-time job with the same NGO that taught her to play. As a female football facilitator, she drew a monthly salary of ₹2,700, most of which was spent on her daily commute. Gradually she began earning enough to support her family. Nationwide, women coaches are not paid well. Says Manpreet Kaur, a coach with Delhi Women’s Football Players Welfare Association, “The more experienced ones get ₹400 per hour. We thank our stars if we can cover travelling costs.” Ironically, the male coaches fare better, even though the Indian women’s team enjoys a better ranking — 62 — on the FIFA scale, as against the men’s ranking of 103.

Anitha continued to play for the Karnataka state team and coached youngsters until a stomach injury cut short her footballing career. Besides her coaching job at the NGO, she was coaching 70 children for free at a government school near her home. “Those children wanted to play, just as I did when I was 13. They came from a poor neighbourhood, just as I did. This is my way to pay back what I received. Perhaps some of them may be able to put together a good life for themselves, courtesy football.” She decided to get a professional certification in order to make a better impact on the young footballers, but that posed its own challenges.

The All India Football Federation (AIFF) awards D-level certification to those seeking to pursue coaching professionally. Although they are charged a token sum for the two-week workshop and test procedures, the candidates often have to travel to a different city, and pay for food, accommodation and travel. “I had to travel to Mumbai for the certificate and it cost me approximately ₹80,000. For a family like ours, it’s a decade’s savings,” says Anitha.

Juliet Miranda, coach for the Goa team, concurs. She has done all — D, C, B and A — levels of certification, and wants to become the national coach. “The expenses could pretty much deter an aspiring coach, since a huge number of the players and coaches come from poor families,” she says. “In India, women coaches and players are a neglected lot. We don’t get half the attention that male players receive. Even when we travel for a championship within the country, we end up paying for it because compensations often don’t cover the ticket cost or the approvals don’t come in time.”

Naturally, football for these women national players is a side hustle, Miranda says. They have to earn their livelihood from other occupations — whether driving cabs or working other menial jobs. Only a few fortunate ones get to teach in government schools or work as a clerk in the railways, she adds.

Aside from the heavy cost, the thought of staying alone in Mumbai proved daunting for Anitha. Seeing her resolve, however, her father agreed to accompany her. They put together their savings, borrowed some more, and boarded the train.

It was during their stay in Mumbai that Anitha’s father watched his daughter fight it out, from close quarters. He was impressed by the grit and skill of that one odd girl among the 22 male candidates. “My parents supported me but not my game. I used to be afraid, seeing him at the gallery, watching me on the field. The group had to huddle; touching and getting touched by strangers was dishonourable as per the set belief, and I was afraid that he will be offended,” Anitha says.

But it worked exactly the other way. Her father had never known his child like this. “Seeing what I was after and what I could do, changed my father’s perception towards me and football. He saw my struggle and my love. My mother says that after I secured a seat among the five successful candidates, he had telephoned home; he had cried and said that he was proud to have a daughter like me.”

Swati Sanyal Tarafdar is a freelance journalist