Former girls’s soccer worldwide Bentla D’coth

Amrutha Aravind

KOCHI

It is the nation’s hottest soccer membership, the membership with the largest fan base within the Indian Super League and the Kerala Blasters’ transfer to quickly cease its girls’s group’s actions has come as a shock to many.

Why ought to the ladies undergo for the issues created by the lads’s group (the nationwide physique AIFF fined the Blasters ₹4 crore for his or her ISL walkout in March), is the large query doing the rounds.

But former worldwide Bentla D’coth was shocked.

“It is their decision but it is not very expensive to run a women’s team,” mentioned Bentla , who was a giant star when Kerala was among the many robust sides in girls’s soccer a few years in the past, who later grew to become a referees teacher and is now a coach too.

“It could come to about ₹50 lakh to run one season. And for a club like Don Bosco (a Kochi-based club which played the Kerala Women’s League), the players’ salary is just about ₹10 lakh for the entire team of about 25 players. Add to that accommodation and other expenses and it could come ₹25 lakh.”

Short-term outlook

Amrutha Aravind who led Chennai’s Sethu FC to the Indian Women’s League title a couple of years in the past and who coached Bengaluru’s Kickstart FC to the runner-up spot within the final IWL, feels that most of the golf equipment have only a short-term outlook with regards to girls’s soccer in Kerala.

“Most of the clubs are just result-oriented, not development-oriented. They have just short-term goals. They just want to run the women’s team for the club’s prestige and have some activity in the few months before tournaments,” she mentioned.

“Except Gokulam Kerala FC (the current IWL champion), no other club thinks seriously about women’s football.”

P. Anilkumar, the final secretary of the Kerala Football Association, had an analogous view.

“If a club has a long-term plan and a proper club structure, the officials will build their own office, their own practice facilities and that property itself will be a big asset for them,” mentioned Anilkumar, in a chat with The Hindu, on Tuesday.

“Even if they don’t want to continue the club later, they can sell off the property. Here, every year they are running behind someone to get the ground, fighting with somebody for training grounds or to get into the stadium and then access is denied by someone. In this situation, how can we say that they have long-term plans?”

But Malavika, one of many large names within the Kerala Blasters girls’s group and its main goal-getter, selected to stay quiet when requested about her response.

Probably, her silence spoke out loud and clear about her agony.