Street soccer gets a leg up from GenY

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With football mania at an all time high due to the ongoing World Cup, another variant of the game i.e. street football is getting popular with the capital’s sports-crazy crowd, who can be seen kicking the ball in gardens, backyards, on the street, in parks and car parks. Just like backyard cricket, it is a shorter and more cooler form of soccer whose roots can be traced to Europe and Latin America.
Says Prateek Aggarwal, a stock analyst, “This is similar to gully cricket and a good way to make it popular even with girls, who are otherwise not very clued in to the game.”
Recently a group of school and Delhi University students, who had set up the Delhi Street Football Club (DSFC) last year organised a Street Football Championship. This five-day long event with each team comprising five players aimed at providing sport enthusiasts, a platform to showcase their skills.
“Street football is very popular in Latin America and we want to replicate the same exhilaration on Delhi streets. It is a fast and furious version of the game with the excitement at its maximum,” says Agastya Dalmia, who is one of the members of DSFC.
The rules here are very different from that of mainstream football and it does not necessarily need to have a large field, goal apparatus and 11 players per team. And it perfectly displays the showmanship learnt from the streets.
“Though I don’t play street style football myself, but I enjoy watching my brother play it in our society garden. I like the idea because it gets over quickly, you don’t have to follow many rules and there are less fights too,” chuckles Himani Verma, a DU student.
But not everybody is game for a T20 of football considering that an average football match is just 90 minutes long. “We don’t really need a chhota pack. But yes, it is a good idea especially for developing countries like ours where there are no proper facilities for players and even poor kids can be seen playing football in the streets with no shoes on,” sums up Sagar Sahai, a soccer enthusiast.