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| Miroslav Klose |
Would you believe if I tell you that I can recollect in hazy graphics the events that happened around me when I was merely a year or two old? You would scoff at that, but I would still persist that I remember the 1990 football World Cup in hazy colourless details of my grandfather’s Hotline television set. Not much of it registered—no Jurgen Klinsmann, Diego Maradona or Lothar Matthaus or any iconic matches. Only Carlos Valderarrama’s hair and Colombia, the name my ears would liken with music.
From then till 2006, I watched all the World Cups with my grandfather who would mark matches on calendar with red ink, change his sleeping cycle during the event, and bet against my teams on finals and lose. Gradually, we added Euro Cups to the list perhaps in dearth of enough football. Then his health began to fail as senility crept in, and Euro 2008 became the last of our soccer bonhomie.
Like cricket I owe to him my football watching habit too. The influence has not been restricted to embracing the sports, it extends to excluding the vital versions of them just because he deemed them inferior or was gleefully unaware of their existence. Rather surprisingly for all his talks of East Bengal and Mohun Bagan matches from his youth, my grandfather never subscribed to the English Premier League (EPL) brand of football. His football only happened once in four years.
But the old we know have haggardly ways, and so perhaps we move out of their shadows. Such Puritanism is not good for the youth. The youth must adapt since they are the globe-trotting people with higher ambitions and greater reach. They must champion the cause of Real Madrid and drape themselves in Barcelona colours. Their heart must bleed for Liverpool and they must swear by the boys from Manchester.
But habits are hard to do away with. From my schooldays I have tried and failed to live up to the peer pressure. Like failing to find any logic in sitting through laps and laps of Moto GP and Formula One, I have occasionally forced myself and with an equal force moved away from watching club football. Thus, I was sceptical when the Indian Premier League came around, criticising it and taking brickbats for my archaic views. Not for me the marauding power of Yusuf Pathan, give me a Cheteshwar Pujara and I will lap him up. Who cares about those in know of the skills of the Gareth Bales and Radamel Falcaos, I would only take if you give me the Miroslav Kloses, the Ronaldos, the Romarios, for they are, as fancily written, the “real deal”.
More on Klose in my News Yaps column: http://www.newsyaps.com/so-klose-yet-so-far/112295/
