Tom English: Rangers seek Indian sign

[ian1964 10,440]

Published on Sunday 27 November 2011 00:52

 

SEVENTY-Five years after Celtic brought the first Indian player to Europe to play professional football, two others have arrived at Rangers. No doubt the trialists at Murray Park, Sunil Chhetri and Jeje Lalpekhlua, are well-versed on the story of their predecessor in Glasgow,

 

Mohammed Salim, a talented winger who never quite made it, remembered in places as the Barefoot Indian of Celtic Park or The Juggler of Calcutta as one Scottish paper called him in 1936. Salimâ??s time here was short-lived. Homesickness got to him. Truth be told, we donâ??t know how long his countrymen are going to be around either. For the players, and for the club, their arrival is like a journey into the unknown.

 

What chance have these guys? Long odds against, you have to say. Chhetri, more experienced and a proven international goalscorer, is considered the best bet, but then he failed to impress when at the Kansas City Wizards last year and didnâ??t hack it during a trial at Coventry a few years earlier. There are also work permit issues. QPR wanted to sign him in 2009 but he was turned down for a permit because India are miles outside the top-70 nations in the world rankings. They still are. And that is still a huge issue. Even if Rangers wanted to sign these players, they might not be able to under the rules. We shall see.

 

Somesh Upadhyay writes about football in his homeland and has waited a lifetime to see an Indian player have an impact abroad. In the beginning there was Salim. The Bangalore-born Paul Wilson flourished at Celtic in the 1970s, but he was raised in Scotland and came through the traditional Scottish route. More recently there was Bhaichung Bhuta, a star at home but one who couldnâ??t cut it at Bury. In between there was Harpal Singh at Leeds and not much else. There are some players of Indian origin â?? Michael Chopra, for instance, and the French international Vikash Dhorasoo â?? but to claim them as Indian would be clutching at straws. In these parts the best known Indian player is probably Jesminder â??Jessâ? Bhamra, a fictional female footballer in the film Bend It Like Beckham.

 

â??If even one of Chhetri or Lalpeklua make it to SPL, the popularity of the SPL in general and Rangers in particular will scale new heights,â? says Upadhyay. â??It has a potential to add 50 million new fans at least. The fact that the SPL is telecast in India will only hasten the process. It is one of the most discussed topics among youths in India. Even in smaller towns, people keep up late at night to watch the matches.â?

 

India is very much on the radar of the established football nations. Sometime today, Raymond Farrelly, head of business development at Rangers, is going to jump on a plane bound for India, heâ??s going to spend the next week moving between cities and meetings, from Mumbai to Delhi to Kolkata, all in the name of establishing links, building relationships that will, it is hoped, lead to a commercial result down the line.

 

Last weekend, Rangers set up a Twitter page delivering Hindi text commentary of their game against St Johnstone. They have plans to provide future commentaries in Punjabi and Urdu. They have met members of the Indian community in Glasgow, will meet some heavy hitters from the football world this week and now they have two international footballers at Murray Park and an expectant audience in India wondering if either of them will be offered a deal to stay.

 

â??My agenda is fact-finding,â? says Farrelly. â??I have a lot of a meetings and part of that is sitting down with members of the Indian media. The news of the two players coming across on trial has provoked a lot of media attention. Itâ??s unbelievable, the scope of it. The circulations of some papers over there blows you away. Thereâ??s a huge amount of interest in what weâ??re doing.

 

â??You only have to look at the financial position of our game and where the club sits right now to know that itâ??s absolutely incumbent on us to explore opportunities around the world. If you look at the growth opportunities for Scottish businesses, a lot of them exist in Asia and in particular in India, where there is a real need for infrastructure and a lot of Scottish companies can provide that. So, yeah, weâ??re looking at commercial opportunities, trying to build an audience. Itâ??s a long-term vision.â?

 

The challenge for Rangers is that plenty of others share the same vision. It is a paradoxical football landscape. There is little money in the domestic league and yet massive crowds at the biggest games, upwards of 120,000 for the elite fixtures. And Indian businesses are in acquisition mode abroad. Venkyâ??s, the poultry giant, owns Blackburn Rovers. An Indian group has long been linked with a takeover at Everton. QPR have had Indian backers. Huge sums are paid out to the English Premier League to screen their games in India. Everton just did a lucrative deal to show their games on mobile phones in the country.

 

Rangers are exploring, but others are well ahead of them. Liverpool run a training camp there already. Manchester United have a presence also. It is said that there are 17 million United fans in India â?? and seven United cafes and bars. Bayern Munich are doing more than anybody, making regular visits while also laying down roots with the Bayern Munich Youth Cup for under-16s in Delhi, held last month.

 

The whole shooting match was organised not by some coaching junior, some inexperienced wannabe but by Werner Kern who was an assistant coach at Bayern in their golden era in the 1970s and who has been instrumental in the coaching of recent stars such as Bastian Schweinsteiger, Philipp Lahm and Thomas Muller. Bayern have even sent a Legends side to play in India. It was captained by somebody called Paul Breitner.

 

Bayern have played to crowds of 120,000 in India. Recently, Argentina played Venezuela in a friendly in Calcutta and they got 90,000 â?? and were pretty disappointed it wasnâ??t a lot higher. The place came to a standstill for Lionel Messi in the same way it was brought to a halt when Pele played there in 1977.

 

â??You see the opportunities out there and it can be overwhelming,â? says Farrelly. â??Thereâ??s something like a 60 per cent growth in football advertising and there is a lot of large multi-national companies who are linked with football in India. Thereâ??s an appetite to work with a club with the history Rangers has. We donâ??t have the world class superstars other clubs have but we have a strategy that is about more than a player walking into a hospital and disappearing for the rest of the year. We have a strategy for a long-term legacy and if we can find the right business partners to develop it then creating an Indian powerhouse is a tangible goal.â?

 

All eyes on Chhetri and Lalpekhlua, then. Not just Rangers eyes, but the eyes of the growing number of football obsessives in a nation of 1.2 billion.

 

http://www.scotsman.com/scotland-on-sunday/sport-columnists/aidan-smith/tom_english_rangers_seek_indian_sign_1_1987329

[bluedan 93]

Interesting. Just so happened i emailed my uncle to see how he's doing just now. He lives in New Delhi and heads up a telecommunications company out there. He emailed me back saying he has a meeting with this Farrelly, he's never met him before so it's obviously business related so i'll try to find out exactly what's being discussed.