In the City of Pearls which produced some of the gems in football history in the 50s and 60s thanks to the great coach S.A. Rahim, it was a football event ‘Go-Al Addict’ with a cause the other day when a voluntary organisation — Street Cause, thanks to the sponsorship of State Bank of Hyderabad, organised a fund-raising tournament to take care of reconstruction of old age homes, orphanages, setting up water plans or adopt in villages.
With about 120 teams taking part in the seven-a-side tournament paying an entry fee the response was pretty good and in a way reminded of the abundance of talent too in the City.
By striking coincidence, the event was inaugurated by Bir Bahadur, a striker of the Indian football team in the 1966 Asian Games in Bangkok, but now struggling to lead a contented life because of acute financial crisis. So, when he formally ‘kicked off’ the event, he could have been tempted to spare a thought at how cruel the destiny has been on him despite he being one of the finest players ever to don India colours. Unfortunately, even the only source of livelihood the makeshift chaat outlet was recently dismantled by the officials as they deemed it as an illegal construction!
Not the kind of life Bahadur would have thought having rubbed the shoulders with the likes of P.K. Banerjee, Chuni Goswami, Prasanta Sinha, Peter Thangaraj and Syed Nayeemuddin in the team.
However, true to his spirit, the ageing Bahadur did not crib about his own plight but showed the true sportsman spirit to be part of the charity event.
With Asian Football Confederation coach E.S. Shyam of State Bank of Hyderabad taking care of the technical aspects of the conduct of the event, it was a pretty successful story too. More importantly, Shyam, who played a key role in SBH recruiting many footballers recently, used his good offices to see that the sports-loving K. Nagaraj, Deputy General Manager, too marked his presence at the event along with his Chief Liason Officer Dr. Mishra.
It was an event where who won eventually did not matter.