让我拷贝一部分上来,可能只是4分一.
The following section will examine in depth the question whether women's football is also on the rise in India or not:
Women's Football in INDIA
Like in the men's game, India was a front-runner in the women's game in Asia when it started.
Initially football was brought to India in the 1880s by the British colonial rulers but at first football was primarily played by the British stationed in India, mainly army teams playing against each other. But Indians soon took to the game and it started to change slowly over the decades. In 1911 when Mohun Bagan won the IFA-Shield trophy in Calcutta, it was a historic win for Indian football. It took another two to three decades for Indian football to make its breakthrough, becoming the most popular sport in India. But over the last two decades football?s popularity has dropped considerably. Just this year wit the good show of the Indian national team interest in the game seems to come back.
The women's game took another couple of decades to take off at all in India.
The beginnings of women's football in India can be traced back to until the early 1970s though the game is yet to take firm root throughout the Indian sub-continent. The national team has done reasonably well on a number of occasions in the Asian Women's circuit, finishing runners-up in the Asian Women's Championships in 1979 and 1985. In 1979 India was the host of the third Asian Women?s Championships, which was held in the southern Indian port city of Calicut. Six teams, Australia, Hong Kong, Mulan Taipei, Malaysia and two teams from the hosts India participated in the championships. The Championship was won by Mulan Taipei with India A finishing as runners-up.
The first Senior National Championship for Women was held in 1975 in the Uttar Pradesh capital of Lucknow.
Class prevailed over exuberance. This aptly summed up Manipur's golden goal victory over Bengal in the seventh senior National women's football championship final at the Polo ground here on Saturday. The hard-fought win was Manipur's fifth in seven years.
There was not an iota of doubt as to which team was the best in the summit class. Endowed with natural built, the Manipuri girls exhibited exemplary skill, speed and stamina, the three Ss very important in football, in abundance in their title triumph. What the Manipuri girls lacked was in tactical sense and bit of imagination.
Bengal knew it had a big battle in hand and it had only one option to win the clash by scoring in a counter attack. But Manipur saw through the game and it did not allow the Bengal forwards to cause any damage though the game went into extra-time after a goalless regulation 80 minutes.
(The Hindu, 23 May 1999)
Like in the men's game, Bengal's women were the initial leaders in the game but in the last decade, the women from Manipur have not only come up but have even overtaken the women from Bengal. Having won the last four National championship finals against Bengal, Manipur are now the undisputed champions and form the core group of the Indian women's national team, along with their Bengali rivals.
The simplest way to prove the dominance of the two teams from Manipur and Bengal is to go through the list of finals of the National championships. The final always reads: Manipur against Bengal; with Manipur winning in seven editions, while Bengal won the other two of the nine editions.
What makes the Manipur against Bengal final interesting is the different styles of play and tactics between the two best teams in India. The biggest strength of Manipur is their speed and its stamina, which enable them to last the entire match, while Bengal relies on individual flair and collective wisdom. The Manipuri tactic is ruthless, with the team attacking throughout the match, making high margin wins nothing special in a match involving Manipur. Meanwhile Bengal totally depends on their ability to surprise the opposition with their unpredictable nature of play. Bengal is also tactically better than Manipur, as they can play a wait and watch game if needed, often not winning by as high margins as Manipur.
The game progressed especially well in Manipur because women in the state have participated actively in every walk of life and football is the most popular game in the state, which lies in the north-east of India.
The North-East is probably the only region in India where cricket has taken a back seat, lacking far behind football. This shows that most of the north-eastern states do not even have a cricket team to play in the Ranji Trophy (Indian national cricket championships). Football is so popular in Manipur that most talented players currently coming-up in India, both women or men, come from the small north-eastern state. It shows that there is not only a passion among the people to watch football but also to play. This clearly distinguishes Manipuri women from women from other states all around India, where football is also popular but not much played by women.
The early exit of last year's semifinalists, Kerala and Orissa, was the shock of the tournament. Kerala, a semifinalist every year till now, failed to reach the knock-out stage for the first time. Kerala, apart from fielding at least five very senior players, who would do well to hang up their boots, also lost the services of Bentala D'Couth, who supervised matches including the final.
(The Sportstar, 24 June 2000)
Other states which also have football enthusiasts among women like their male counterparts are Goa, Kerala, Orissa and lately Punjab. But Kerala seems to have problems in finding talented youngsters for its state team. Manipur and Bengal, Goa, Kerala, Orissa and Punjab all have international players in their ranks but the over-dependence on the star players is a major problem for the teams.
Up to now football, like other sports in India is very job oriented. The job options for women footballers in India are extremely limited, as women footballers cannot make a living from football. So even today, except in a few places like Manipur, Goa, Bengal, Mumbai or Kerala, women's football has hardly any existence. The Government Undertaking Indian Railways are still the only agency, which enable women to have a job and play football. There are some others, like the government undertaking, the Income Tax Department and the Verona Company, which offer women money to play for them but that kind of offer does not necessarily guarantee them a job.
This situation is slowly changing at least in Calcutta, Bengal. Since the season 2000/01 onwards, two of India?s top football clubs, Mohun Bagan AC and East Bengal Club have joined the Calcutta Women?s Football League with their own women teams.
The final of the Calcutta Women?s Football League was held, as had been expected, between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan in front of 12.000 football supporters at the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium. East Bengal won 1–0 and the East Bengal fans cheered their women?s team the like their male counterparts!
The common sponsor of the two teams, the United Breweries Group, wants to bring in a touch of professionalism into the women's game, and make it popular in Calcutta and later on in other states as well.
The UB-Group commitment comes, as the company sees a lot of sponsorship possibilities in women's football in India, which would help them market their products and the entry of two of India top clubs will certainly help that goal.
Women's football had made some initial progress in the seventies but has little to talk about in terms of achievements after the Women's Football Federation of India was taken over by the All-India Football Federation in the early 1990s. The present AIFF president, Mr. Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, represents women's football in the federation but the game is always treated as the poor relation of the family. On a number of occasions, the WFFI even threatened to leave the AIFF due to a lack of proper support.
The Indian women?s team was criticised for conceding 36 goals in the 1998 Bangkok Asian Games, losing 0-7 to South Korea, 1-13 to Taiwan and a humiliating 0-16 against China but the team was neither given an exposure trip nor proper exposure nor proper exposure before the Asiad. As a practice match, the girls were made to play against the Bengal under-16 boys team at the SAI Eastern Centre in Calcutta, that was all.
On the other hand, after the women's team got an exposure trip to Germany in 1997, they played a successful Asian Women's Championships in China, winning by a record 10-0 against Guam, 3-0 against Hongkong and losing only 0-1 to Asian giants Japan. Due to a worse goal difference, the Indian women's team was unlucky to miss out on a semi-final spot and a chance to qualify for the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup, played in the United States. The trip was not made possible by the All-India Football Federation but due to the hard work and help put forward by some Non-Resident Indians in Germany. The group of NRIs from the Stuttgart-Heilbronn area provided the women with training facilities which they had never enjoyed before, due to contacts with local clubs and the German football federation, DFB. During their trip to Germany, the women were taken very well care of by the German federation, something they sadly do not get from their own federation.
But this was not the only attempt by the German NRIs to help Indian women?s football. In February 2000 Sujata Kar , a striker, and Alpana Sil, a midfielder, came to Germany as the first Indian women players to sign a contract as women footballers outside India. The two Bengal players signed a three-month trial contract in Europe with German Oberliga Baden-Wuerttemberg league club TSV Crailsheim, with prospects of long–terms contract had they not returned only after a month of their arrival having played only a test match due to problems with their "International Transfer Clearance".
Favourites called the tune and the pretenders kept dancing till the end. The holder Manipur and last year's runner- up Bengal began their tune up to the summit clash on May 29 with run away victories in the opening quarterfinal group league matches of the 8th senior National Women's football Championship at the Karbi Anglong Sports Association ground here on Saturday.
Manipur, playing in its typical all-out attacking game, pumped in 10-0 against last year's semifinalist Kerala in a group E clash. Bengal scored only five goals without reply against Orissa as it preferred to take things easy in the second half of the group F tie. The highlight of the day was a hat-trick by Bengal and India striker Sujata Kar.
(The Hindu, 21 May 2000)
In the last few years the national championship for women has become a joke. Except for the finals involving Manipur and Bengal. Even the teams behind the big two, like Goa, Kerala, Assam and Maharashtra get beaten by huge margins by the top two. The problem is that most teams are too weak to compete with the top teams but even among the weaker teams there is a huge gap, so that weak teams beat even weaker teams, also by huge margins.
In the opener of the 2000 national championships in Diphu, Assam, the hosts Assam beat Rajasthan 26-0, equalling the 14-year record of Madhya Pradesh beating Gujarat. In the semi-finals Assam themselves one of the most improved teams in the 2000 championships, were trashed 12-0 by ruthless giants Manipur.
Another major problem is that the national championships for women are mostly hosted in remote places, where facilities are few and media coverage is near zero. Mainly local and state newspapers report about the championships; "The Hindu" is the only national newspaper to report on the championships.
