The harsh reality of being a football expert in India: What's wrong if John Abraham and Gaurav Kapoor host football shows?

People have been wrongfully harsh on the panel above

The FIFA pre-game show Café Rio which is being aired on Sony Six has drawn a lot of flak from the viewers regarding the personnel chosen as experts for the panel and their supposedly inadequate presenting skills.

The show, which is hosted by Gaurav Kapoor and MTV VJ Nikhil Chinappa and consists of names like former French and Manchester United player Mikael Silvestre, England player Peter Crouch, Indian football captain Sunil Chettri and Bollywood actor John Abraham, has raised quite a storm on social media. Every football ‘fan’ worth his or her salt has wasted no time denigrating the experts, the channel and the overall media coverage of sports in the country.

But are the experts really not up to the mark?

Questions have been asked about what Bollywood actor John Abraham is doing on the show, and Gaurav Kapoor has been accused of having a bad sense of humour. Facebook and Twitter have been awash with posts questioning the knowledge of the game that these people have, and the scorn heaped upon John Abraham in particular has been nothing short of vitriolic.

But does any Indian really have the right to question someone’s football knowledge?

It is an undeniable truth that football is considered to be a secondary game in the country, and no matter how vociferously the people claim to true fans of the game, what remains unchanged is that football in India is still down in the dumps.

Before we get into further discussion I would like to ask a simple question here: how many Indians follow the I-league, the top domestic football competition in the country?

With the World Cup fever at its highest at the moment, it won’t be hard to miss a self-confessed football fan showing his/her support for the team by proudly wearing the team jersey. Even when big events like World Cup are not happening we see countless fans wearing the jerseys of teams like Barcelona, Manchester United et al to show their support. But during the regular I-league season, you will rarely, if ever, spot jerseys of Mohun Bagan, East Bengal or Mohammedan Sporting.

Hardly anybody cares about Indian football, and even those who do are turned into laughing stocks. Worse, I don’t even see the jerseys or accessories of these clubs even being produced in large numbers, let alone selling.

Talk about football and we are always up to date with the latest signings in La Liga or the EPL, but none of us even know the top five signings which happened in the I-league.

So when we ourselves don’t know enough about the sport in our country, do we have any right to blast these experts who are trying so hard to do their best?

We should be happy that the panel has names like Silvestre, Crouch and Chhetri. We are soon going to see names like Robbie Fowler and Peter Shilton joining the show. To my mind, these experts are good enough to share their analysis with us. When we talk about how we can improve the standards of the game in our country what we fail to see is that the interaction between Chettri and his colleagues on the show could help Indian football in a lot of ways.

Of course, we cannot expect a Gary Lineker on the show because the high-profile experts would be tied up with different broadcasters elsewhere. But the presence of Silvestre and Crouch does bring a lot of experience to the table, because they have played the game at the highest level.

As far as the Indian hosts are concerned, aren’t we being a little hypocritical when we slam them for their ‘poor’ knowledge of the game? Nobody complained when Gaurav Kapoor was hosting the pre-game show during the IPL, but as soon as he starts hosting a football show he is abused like there’s no tomorrow.

Why aren’t we willing to give him a chance?

Kapoor has always had this image of being a man with a funny bone, and he is not going to change it any time soon. Whatever his knowledge of football may be, he is still better than many fans in the country who don’t know anything about the game but try hard to show off their ‘knowledge’ to anyone who’d listen. Chinappa, meanwhile, has always been a no-nonsense man and he is not doing badly here; his job is to ask questions, and that’s exactly what he is doing.

Talking about John Abraham’s presence on the show, he was there only for one session and since he was promoting the tournament in the country (unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have seen him wearing a big Neymar mask and showing his support for Brazil). It wasn’t really unexpected that he would make an appearance on the show, in particular because he has the ability to draw in viewers.

In a country like India, where cricket and Bollywood sells like hot cakes, one cannot really question the rationale behind getting these kinds of stars on the show.

We never complain when Bollywood actors make appearances on other shows to promote their movies. Abraham, in fact, should be looked upon as an ambassador and a promoter of football who did a fairly good job of sharing his views about the game. He was not there to promote his movies; he made one appearance and just went about doing his business.

Perhaps it is time for all those fans who have sharply rebuked the show to look at the positive sides of it too. The fans in India need to learn to embrace the game and rise above unmindful hate for the people who are working hard to keep them updated; criticizing any association between football and Indian pop culture just for the sake of criticizing it will get us nowhere.

Football is a beautiful game; let’s give ourselves a chance to enjoy it to the fullest.