Tighter norms make UP hire football coach from Delhi
Country’s biggest-ever state doesn’t have even one AFC ‘B’ licence certificate coach for the game
LUCKNOW : Uttar Pradesh would have not played in the prestigious Santosh Trophy National Football Championship this year, if they had not hired an AFC ‘B’ licence certificate coach from New Delhi ‘on payment’.
Uttar Pradesh Football Sangh (UPFS) had no other option but to hire a coach Anoop Singh from New Delhi as, from this season, All India Football Federation has started denying permission to teams not having AFC ‘B’ licence certificate coach at the national championship.
“There is no ‘B’ licence certificate coach available in the state so we went on to hire a coach from New Delhi for the North Zone Championship scheduled in Haldwani,” UPFS joint general secretary Mohd Shahid said on Sunday.
“Yes, we hired him (Anoop) on payment as, without the ‘B’ licence certificate coach, our team could have not participated,” he said.
He, however, said most of the coaches in Uttar Pradesh lacked education qualifications and did not even know English.
“We don’t have even a single well-educated coach in the Uttar Pradesh Sports Directorate, who knows English. There is no dearth of talent in the state, and many have appeared in the ‘B’ licence certificate coach exams too, but to no avail,” added Shahid, whose father Mohd Shamsuddin was the UPFS secretary for the last many years.
Besides Mohd Shameem, a sports officer with the UP Sports Directorate at Bareilly, Lucknow’s Karan Singh, Vinay Goswami of Bareilly, and I Chand of Gorakhpur are the AFC ‘C’ license certificate coaches in the state.
NO CERTIFICATES!
In fact, Uttar Pradesh lost all their three Group B matches i.e. against Delhi, Chandigarh and Himachal Pradesh.
Soon after losing the first match, the players were allegedly forced to sign a paper, which stated that if they lost the remaining two matches, they won’t ask for the certificates of participation.
“Ever since we landed at Haldwani a day before the start of the tournament last Sunday, our mobile phones were seized by the team officials and we were not even allowed to talk to our family members and friends. We could get our phones back after a week and that too minutes before boarding the train for the return journey,” players said on condition of anonymity.
“In fact, we aren’t sure when to get our participation certificates. We felt like (we were) in custody in Haldwani and even the boarding and food facilities weren’t good. We were forced to eat poor quality food and stayed at a hostel, instead of a hotel for which All India Football Federation paid Rs 1000 per day per player,” said a player from Faizabad.
“The so-called hired coach didn’t even coach us and it was the team’s assistant coach, who was instructing us at the ground,” he said.
Mohd Shahid, however, expressed ignorance about any such situation in Haldwani. “I don’t know about any such issue with the players. Let the managers’ report come to me and then I will respond,” he said.
It is learnt that recently UPFS had done a similar thing to a woman footballer, scribbling ‘poor performance’ on the certificate of the player. UPFS had to face the wrath of AIFF because of this step.
AGE FUDGING
Meanwhile, a Right to Information (RTI) activist Mohit Singh has alleged that it’s the selectors of UPFS, who make changes in players’ date of birth as per the ‘requirement of the situation’.
A list of 25 players, which is in possession of Hindustan Times, has many irregularities about the date of birth of players, who were meant to take part in the senior women’s state team coaching camp at Agra in August. The date of birth of almost all the players was ‘deliberately’ changed and there was overwriting too. Interestingly, the list has signatures of all five selectors.
“It’s all baseless. If the date of birth had been changed by the selectors of UPFS, AIFF would have rejected it. There are some forces, who are trying to malign the image of the football body in the state,” said Mohd Shahid.