Sita, Geeta And The Rest Of The Squad

In a village in Jharkhand, an American and a hundred Adivasi girls are training to make football dynamite, says SHANTANU GUHA RAY

EVERY MORNING, a dusty ground on the road between the non-descript villages of Rukka and Hutu, close to Ranchi, reverberates with battle cries. In darkness, young Adivasi girls jog noisily before starting their day’s practice of football. Leading the pack is a slender American from faraway Minnesota who has made this obscure hamlet his home. A casual bystander in Ranchi might mistake Franz Gastler for an ArcelorMittal representative prospecting mines in this mineral-rich state — if only Gastler didn’t look like he has been afflicted by what he jokingly calls reverse social mobility.

Single goal Franz Gastler and the girls at their mandatory jog Photo: RAJESH KUMAR SEN

The 27-year-old Harvard graduate has worked for the Colombian government, Coca Cola, the Boston Consulting Group and Usha Martin. But what he is doing now could turn out to be his best strategy yet. He has shaped the girls into a crack football unit. In seven months, the state’s under-13 girls football team has gained the fourth spot in the national rankings from an abysmal 20th. Gastler trained 13 of the 17 girls in the team.

In a village where girls are routinely confined to the kitchen, Gastler’s achievement is incredible. Yet, a modest Gastler says he merely uncorked a fizzy bottle. “The girls had the potential, football was a rallying point and I merely connected the two,” says Gastler, who won his biggest battle last year when, after months of persuasion, the parents allowed the girls to play football. “At first it was maddening to try to get them to the field at the same time. One day I asked if any of them had clocks in their houses. Only one did and it was broken.”

Doubts about Gastler’s motives — What was he up to? Is he a missionary on the prowl for conversion? Was he from a mining corporation? What did he want with the girls? — has not died entirely. Helena Tete, a volunteer who has joined Gastler’s programme, says, “Recently, one of the players told us that some adults in the village had warned her parents that we were going to kidnap her and send her to America.” Tete adds reasonably, “It isn’t as crazy as it sounds because 30,000 young girls are trafficked from this state every year.”

But the toughest resistance Gastler encountered was from the mothers who missed the girls’ help with housework, and from local boys who wanted to take over the new field during monsoon. But now, the mothers are some of the biggest cheerleaders.

The list that started with three footballers is now brimming with a 100-plus figure. Geeta, Sita and Neeta, regulars in the Jharkhand U-13 side, do not miss a day of practice. For Sita in particular, whose 15-year-old sister was married off last year, playing football has delayed the prospect of her early marriage. “My mother is changing,” she says. “She used to only think about me doing housework.”

“We cannot sleep before a special match,” says Sita. She calls the 8-1 win over the Delhi team at the last nationals her most cherished moment. “They all listened to music from their handsets and came to the match in cars. We had one transistor for 18 of us and slept on the floor,” says Sita. “The Delhi goalkeeper didn’t know what struck her,” she adds, remembering one of her winning goals.

For Sita and her friends, football has been a great leveller. “We are convinced of making it to the junior team. And if he (Gastler) stays with us, we are to give the national team many wonderful moments, we just have to wait,” says Neeta Kumari.

Gastler is bluntly realistic about the players. “Their resilience and resourcefulness leaves me in awe. But to reach their full potential they will need top class coaching and facilities, which can only come with support from the state.”

GASTLER ALSO knows the battle will continue to be uphill. He knows he is not a world-class football player or coach — he is a hockey player who has planted football dreams in the minds of the girls. “I am a coaching kleptomaniac. I steal whatever works — mostly from YouTube and Nike coaching videos online.” During training he focusses on what he calls ‘3Ls’ — no laps, no lines, no lectures. “I am no Alex Ferguson but my own limits should not be their ceiling. “The best coach is the game itself. We set up an environment where they can get better at something that’s important to them.”

Gastler has to raise more than Rs 20 lakh a year to keep this team programme going and growing. He is trying to raise enough to purchase land for a football field. “More kids keep coming and the field keeps shrinking. Two houses have sprung up on the football field since we started.” Some help is coming. The state government could open some doors for Gastler, who has also been promised funding by Coca Cola India that sponsored the Mir Iqbal Trophy for juniors.

The task is herculean but there’s never a lack of dedication. “He is the first person to reach the ground for practice. He goes there at 4.30 am when it’s still dark. Only the village dogs give him company. And then, we all get there,” says Anand Gope, one of the other coaches, talking of Gastler’s no-nonsense regime. At times, Gastler confesses, he misses the cool climate of Minnesota. He misses beer and sandwiches but once he sits down under the open sky for a meal with the parents of the girls, he enjoys the peace.

And as he undertakes the endless responsibilities — right now he is fixing bamboo poles to create makeshift goalposts — he knows the beautiful game is working its charms. When Poonam Toppo, 17, got engaged, she insisted Gastler and the coaches talk to her fiance and make him understand why football was important to her. The fiance, Rajesh Oraon, says today, “I will not pull her off the pitch. If that’s what pleases her, I have no problem.”

Savitri, the mother of Sita Kumari, sometimes feels self-conscious when she sees Gastler at her home in the evening, the floor crowded with ricebeer drinkers who pay Rs 10 for an earthen pot of haria and another Rs 10 for a bowl of peanuts. But that is an occasional twinge. “Without football, Sita would be working with me in the kitchen, making haria for the villagers. It would have been a life of obscurity,” she says.

Gastler, standing close, is saying nothing about his future, but is talking up Jharkhand’s chances of reaching the finals of the next Under-13 tournament and even winning the trophy.

For him, today is a happy day. The girls will play their first match under the floodlight in a huge stadium in the heart of Ranchi. The sanction came after days of shuttling between government offices on his Royal Enfield motorcycle. But what if the lights go off in the stadium, a routine occurrence in Jharkhand? Gastler laughs. “Our girls begin practice an hour before sunrise every day and in the summers they play past sunset. They’re pretty used to playing in the dark.” And as Martin Luther King Jr. once famously observed, “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”

WRITER’S EMAIL
shantanu@tehelka.com