The upwardly mobile that India Arsene Wenger will fly into, on or around 19 November, is quite likely to be full of 50-over cricket, complete with spontaneous jubilation, especially if the hosts pull it off, with the summit showdown partially coinciding with the high-visibility global colossus’ five-day stay in this country. It means that the media-magnate chief of Fifa’s global development initiative might find himself asking India’s football bigwigs how they felt being left marginalised, if not entirely eclipsed, by cricket, which is preparing only now to break into the Olympic Games in Los Angeles fixed for 2028. It will be embarrassing for Kalyan Chaubey, president of the All India Football Federation, not to claim even so much as bragging rights after being able to get the game’s popularly known Professor to visit a country yet to make a World Cup beyond its qualifiers despite having played it for much more than a century.
But we can do worse than supplying sharp-eyed Wenger with the evidence of our institutional stupidity as talks are held over a state-of-the-art coaching facility, given that Chaubey, leading the AIFF, left no one in any doubt about his capacity for glossy but hollow projects. He has taken India’s national championship to Saudi Arabia, where crowds had been unlikely to fetch up for those low-key experimental efforts and didn’t, had diverse rules guiding India’s states on the eligibility of foreign players in domestic competitions and pulled strings at the highest level to have an underqualified national squad sent to the Asian Games. Chaubey now plans a glamour-glorified, central tutorial venture in a land whose essential strength happens to be the diversity of the styles and talents regional football was once associated with. Wenger will perhaps know all this. He still has the mind and application of a student.
And though he once went nine years without a trophy with Arsenal, he had before that discovered superb footballers for them. He lost the Champions League final to Barcelona in 2006 but the Gunners remembered getting as far as that. For much of his time in the London club, he was required to keep tabs on their expenses and accounts, but he made his name in the English Premier League with new ideas on scouting, training and diet. He, of course, knows his job inside out but that may not even turn out to be half the story of his narrative in India. Wenger should interact with the country’s technical people rather than the administrative lot. How India can bridge the gap with leading Asian teams ahead of next year’s continental competition will go a long way towards making us really proud of the boys in blue. The success of Wenger’s tour will hinge on what we can get out of him rather than what he does to India and with Indians. Chaubey faces a really tough test even if all he wants is for the tour to live up to the hype.