On a balmy August evening, a game of football is about to begin at the astroturf of the Regional Sports Centre in Kochi. Twelve boys are lined up on one side of the ground. Malaysian Loo Wai Keong, the technical advisor who monitors the game, throws the ball into the field. The game is afoot.

Mohammed Azharuddin collects the ball and moves forward. Keong keeps instructing him. “Shoot,” shouts Keong. The ball hits the top right corner of the net. It’s a goal.

Then, when Abhimanyu Naskar dribbles forward, Keong shouts at him in English. But Naskar knows only Hindi. Dehradun-based physical instructor Naresh Singh explains to him, “He is telling you to move faster. Otherwise the defender will take the ball away from you.”

From a distance, this may seem like a regular football practice, but from close quarters, that is not the case: all the players are visually impaired.

They have come from places like Delhi, Dehradun, Mumbai, Kolkata, Jodhpur and Kochi, and are training to represent India at the Asian Championships in Tokyo during September 2-7. The team is being mentored by Kochi-based Society for Rehabilitation of the Visually Challenged (SRVC) and the Indian Blind Sports Association (IBSA). Says Shriya Saran, brand ambassador for Indian blind football, “The Asian Championships will provide a great exposure for the Indian team.”
 

Five-a-side football for the visually impaired has its own rules: four players should be B1 (fully visually impaired), while the goalkeeper can be B3, which means that he can have partial sight, or be fully sighted. The Indian team has two sighted goalkeepers in Sanjay Saji and Melson Jacob.

The area of play is 40x20 metres, much smaller than the regular football field size of 105x68 metres. Cushioned boards on its side ensure that the players do not get hurt. The footballers, who are partially visually impaired, wear blindfolds so that they can’t see at all. “A game lasts 50 minutes, with a break of 10 minutes. During a match, players can be substituted any number of times,” says M C Roy, project head, SRVC.

The ball is smaller than the regular one and “it does not bounce as much,” says coach Sunil Mathew. “It is slightly heavier because there are ball bearings inside it,” which make a noise when the ball moves, letting  the players know where it is. Before the start of a game, coaches of the two teams stand at the sidelines. As the match progresses, they shout frantic instructions to the players.

When a defender approaches a player who has the ball, he has to keep shouting “Voie, voie”. Sometimes they collide. Many players have suffered injuries on their arms, knees and faces.

“I was selected after taking part in the Nationals in January at Delhi,” says centre-forward M D Salim Khan, a probationary officer in a State Bank of India branch in New Delhi. “I am looking forward to going to Tokyo, although the competition is going to be tough.” The other visually impaired teams include Iran, Japan, China, Korea and Malaysia.

The concept of an Indian visually impaired football team came to Mathew accidentally while he was researching football on the Internet. “A country like Brazil, with a population of 198 million, has 660 visually challenged football teams, while India, with a population of 1.2 billion, has never put up five people for a tournament,” he says. “That was the impetus for SRVC and the IBSA to form a team.”

For the team to take part in the Tokyo championships, a generous monetary grant from the Tata Trusts in Mumbai tilted the scales. Biswanath Sinha, associate director of Tata Trusts, says, “We want to champion the cause of the visually challenged, their right to sports, entertainment and a quality life like every other human being.”

Source: http://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/Goals-in-Their-Sights/2015/08/2...