Kick it like Rahim Sa’ab

MAIDAAN ★★★■

Director: Amit Ravindernath Sharma

Cast: Ajay Devgn, Priyamani, Gajraj Rao, Rudranil Ghosh

IT TAKES a village to raise a child. And it takes a country to create a cracking team capable of beating the best in the world. The inspiring real-life story of Syed Abdul Rahim, pioneering football coach and manager under whose watch India won two gold medals, one each in the Asian Games of 1951 and 1962, is at the heart of Maidaan.

Just for bringing to life a now sadly forgotten figure who galvanised a young team to do its best against such formidable Asian foes as Indonesia and S Korea, the Maidaan team deserves major props. It is football, in which India hasn’t been able to make an international dent after Rahim bowed out, following a hard struggle with lung cancer, and not cricket, the go-to sport for Bollywood sporting dramas.

It matters a great deal that the man was Muslim, a brave choice in today’s India. The real-life Rahim, called Rahim Sa’ab, was born in Hyderabad, but most of his battles were fought and won in Calcutta, the bastion of Indian football.

It also matters that the rag-tag team that Rahim, played with patent sincerity — and only a hint of the slo-mo swagger — by Ajay Devgn, has the kind of composition so syncretic that it makes you ache with nostalgia: players of all regions and religions jostling in the changing room and in the field, trying to function as a single-minded fighting machine.

It is regional pride that becomes the thorn between Rahim and his chief foe (Rudranil Ghosh) in the Football Federation of India, backed by a powerful sports writer (Gajraj Rao): in the games people play behind the scenes, pulling strings of who gets to be in the team, and who gets to go on the coveted ‘foreign’ tours, it’s more a question of Bengal vs Hyderabad, rather than Hindu vs Muslim. Remove a voluble Bengali from the espousal of his favourite teams, and you will get thunderous silence, and in this case, straight-up enmity.

The three-hour-long film feels like a stretch in places where the drama is amped-up just-for-effect and the blaring background music threatens to overpower the action. Not all the musical stretches are terrible, though: the one that accompanies the discovery of a player in an unexpected quarter early in the film, for example, is lovely. But after a point, it becomes too loud, too much, and you feel like clapping your hands over your ears.

Maid a an also tends to get into an explanatory tell-don’ t-show mode often. And the templates of a sporting drama stay templated: an encouraging-speech-by-coachjust-before-a-crucial-match comes off more a colourless long dialogue on the ‘power of one ’, than arousing let’ s- go-and-get -’ em anthem. What makes up for it is the great action on the field: even a novice like me understood the ‘strategy’ sketched out by the coach which helped India beat S Korea 2-1, a historic win that’s never been bested.

The performances are all effective. Gajraj Rao, sporting a terrible wig and permanent smirk, is terrific as the spiteful sports journalistwith an axe to grind. as isg ho sh, as the unctuous, shingara-loving babu who revels in his power and has zero affection for the sport. these tend to become one-note sometimes, but work for the kind of film it is, in which nuance is sacrificed for statement.

Some of the domestic scenes between the constantly cigarette-smoking Rahim (this is a film where most male characters smoke a lot) and his faithful wife Runa (Priyamani) make you smile. And the actors who make up the team (standing in for some well-known names as Chuni Goswami, PK Banerjee, Peter Thangaraj, among the others), mostly fresh faces except a couple of familiar ones, all look as if they could well be players.

It would have been a bonus if we had been given some background on these men, who came from all parts of the country. a few get a musical collage as a back-story, but given that the team was built painstakingly, brick by brick, by ra hi ms a’ ab, we could have done with more detailing of these bricks in the wall. Less repetitive wrangling in the federation office, and more attention to how a team, which started with playing against top global teams minus footwear, was transformed into the well-oiled one Rahim Sa’ab put together, would have been useful, too. Rahim Sa’ab is usually accompanied by an assistant/ gofer, who doesn’ t seem to have an actual job; he is there as comic relief/hero’s best friend, and comes off not as a character but creaky trope.

Overall, Maidaan is not without its flaws, but this underdog story makes you want to clap and cheer and wipe away a proud tear.