Sports
Dearth of talent stumbling block
Inadequate football activities and lack of proper system tends to be the stumbling block for Nepal in producing enough football talents that can lift the country to the next level.Prajwal Oli
Inadequate football activities and lack of proper system tend to be the stumbling block for Nepal in producing enough football talents that can lift the country to the next level.
The fact that a handful of footballers are carrying the national team baton for the last two years speaks volume of the predicament. Tribhuvan Army Club forward George Prince Karki is the only new face to make the national team debut during the two years span. The national team has been, otherwise, reliant more on the old faces. The miserable state is such that the head coach has been provided a terribly low pool of 28-35 players for selection.
The grassroots development is almost non-existent with Anfa relying on handful of school-level and age-group tournaments. The junior national team is heavily reliant on Anfa Academy products with only three players—Abhishek Baral, Suraj Jeu Thakuri and Dhiraj Shrestha—making it to the 23-member squad from open selection for the AFC U-19 Championship Qualifiers in Kyrgyzstan recently. Twenty others all came through the Anfa Academy. The end result is for everyone to see as Nepal finished bottom of the Qualifying table without a point and goal in four matches on November 8.
The U-16 team is no exception as they crashed out of the qualifying rounds of AFC U-16 Championship in August finishing at the bottom of the four-team standings. Again the football governing body relied on their own Academy to form the U-16 team with only five non-Academy members succeeding to break into the 23-member squad. Fifteen of the current senior national team players have themselves come through the Anfa Academy, which is in operation for the last two decades.
Currently there are 57 players at Anfa Academy in Lalitpur: 25 in U-14 and 32 in U-16 age-groups. More often Anfa releases the players once they play AFC U-16 tournaments. Sometimes Anfa even keeps the players until they reach 19. Anfa also operated two more academies in Dharan and Butwal but they are less functional. In fact, the Dharan Academy has been shut for the last five years while Butwal Academy is operated at the local level by Rupandehi District Football Association.
Anfa Academy development director, deputy general secretary and spokesperson Sanjib Mishra argues that the absence of the League for last four years was the major reason for the dearth of footballers in recent times. “League is the backbone of football anywhere in the world and in the absence of it you can not expect players to come through,” said Mishra. Mishra believes that nurturing young talents from handful of academies was not enough. “The concept of hand-picking players for Academy is never enough. We need to do more,” said Mishra without elaborating what actually is needed to be done to address the crisis.
Nabin Pande, the president of Bayern Munich Fan Club of Nepal and manager of ‘A’ division outfits Himalayan Sherpa Club says, football talents are in abundance in the country but the stakeholders are unable to identify them. “Numerous such talents are going down the drain due to improper selection system as well as incapable manpower to carry out such a process to say the least,” argues Pande.
“Rather than focusing on academies to produce players, Anfa should create conducive environment for playing game across the country. Most of the footballers in the current national team are outside of the capital city,” Pande said. “Furthermore there is no platform for emerging talents to break into the national team. Of late football is surviving only by some district-run tournaments.”
Pandey calls for Anfa to create conducive environment to draw youths towards the game and not away from it. “They should come up with not just the proper plan but also needs to have willingness to development the game as a whole,” added Pandey.
Despite the players crunch, Nepal made remarkable success winning four titles during the period. Clearly with bigger and better pool of players, one can hope for Nepal to scale even greater heights at international level.
Nepal won the Bangabandhu Gold Cup (Jan, 2016) in Bangladesh, South Asian Games U-23 men’s football (Feb, 2016) in India, AFC Solidarity Cup (Nov, 2016) in Malaysia and Saff U-18 Championship (Sept, 2017) in Bhutan.