The extravagant ceremony at the start and end of the Indian Super League proved one thing, as long as money is pumped into a sport, it will get a good start. The Indian Super League concluded with Atletico de Kolkata defeating the Kerala Blasters in the final and the celebrations began for the Kolkata team while Kerala had to deal with the disappointment of not winning the first league title.
However, the league was a hit with record numbers coming to see the games and some of the stars from other countries, never was there so much excitement about football in the country and we should thank to organizers for doing that.
It was a dream for most of the fans but seeing players like Del Piero, Pires, Trezeguet and Garcia coming out and playing for their clubs was simply amazing, for all the good there was in the league the question is how can they make the league better next season?
Better scheduling
The ISL tried the IPL platform and schedule a game almost every day for the 2 months it was run, while it worked for the IPL since the games were fast and crazy, the football equivalent doesn’t work that well.
Teams were playing games every 3 days which only works for the European clubs having huge squads, the ISL teams had never played before let alone play games back to back in a span of 3 days. The lustre and excitement of the league soon died off and well games weren’t well attended, it isn’t easy for people to watch a football watch in the middle of the week, so for next season hopefully fewer weekday games and they can play all the 4 fixtures per game week spread between Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Better tackling
The one thing that got most people worried was the kind of tackling that took place in the league. This was supposed to be glorious football; it ended up being a street fight most of the time. Players did not either go into a challenge fairly or did not know how to tackle. Each game could have seen a couple of red cards easily as the tackling was horrible, it is a mini miracle that no player got injured seriously.
The refereeing has to improve
The IPL would bring in the best umpires to deal with the games, the ISL couldn’t do that and it showed in the refereeing standards of the league. There were so many bad calls it was insane, the least the organizers should have done was to hire only I League referees but even that was not done, there were some experienced foreign referees but most of the games were poorly officiated, not the best way to sell football in India.
Temper tantrums
With so many players coming in from all over the world, there were always going to be a few big egos and that was on show in the league, often players would take each other on, not street fighter style but there seemed to be not only a lack of respect for the fellow players but also for the officials.
The sight of seeing some of the best players in the world pushing and shoving others about really left a sour taste in the mouth and how can we forget the Atletico de Kolkata-FC Goa clash during the league stage which ended up with news that Antonio Habas had punched Robert Pires and Fikru was banned for head-butting a player, not the best thing to try and push football in India.
Overall it was a pretty good first season for the Indian Super League, if only they can improve the quality of the game, the league will grow and become much more followed by fans.
Picture courtesy: Zee news& NDTV