United Sports Club

The tragic performance of the youth teams of United Sports Club this season was quite unexpected and a dishonourable matter for the management of the purple brigade. United Sports Club is a team which is quite well- known for their consistency in the youth divisions for last five years. They have some glorious records including few remarkable victorious against top academies like TFA, Pune FC, East Bengal , Mohun Bagan etc.  United have been maintaining their own style of football since the time of the Dutch coach Mr. Eelco Schattorie. But with time the positive influence that Eelco left behind with us became vague and now almost one the verge of end.

It has been an awful year for the purple brigades, unlike previous years they could not do well in any of the youth leagues (U-13, U-15 and U-18). From the very inception of the registration problem things were not in place for them. Initially they faced some difficulties to get the players registered according to their wish and when it had somehow happened, things were still not in their favour at all.

The U-18 I-League team began their practice session just few days left to begin the league and on other hand in U-13 and U-15 were in total in mess under the dominance of their scouts Jyotirmoy Chakraborty and bluff master Debasish Das. While taking about the impasse, I must agree with the fact that there has been a huge negligence from the part of the management. There inefficiency was revealed while selecting the coaches and beginning the practice sessions just before the commencement of the youth league.

The naive attitude of the management made them pay a huge cost at the end of the league, as result all the three teams ended almost at the bottom stage of the respective league tables. The entire phenomenon, United fell downgraded and stood in a fatal position as far as their high profile youth development was concerned.

Behind, the facade of growth, there has been an adverse and unpleasant system followed by the entire management people, a system which was itself an invasion for any organization which wants to sustain consistency. However, one of the reasons for their success for so many years is the honesty and true willingness to keep the organizing intact in the dip root of two people namely Alokesh Kundu and Siddhartha Bhattacharya (Nabab Da). Granting their true and honest approach towards football we must remember that while running an organizing one can’t ignore the basic fundamental aspects to run an organization like ‘United Sports Club’.

While trying to evaluate the cause of their failure, there are certain reasons we can observe and one of them is the careless attitude of their coaches. Despite the fact that they increased their budget in coaching department which is almost double than the last year (2016), there was a clear shade of unprofessionalism in the behaviour of the coaches from the commencement of the CFL season. As a result United and Patha Chakra both sustained a blow in the CFL, although Patha Chakra someway manage to save their relegation but United couldn’t show any progress in their poor performance throughout the season. I believe this is somewhere United management should have understood the crisis and took some initiative to bring things in place. But very unprofessionally they remained quiet and waited to experience the worst disaster of the season in the youth I-League competition.

I believe this downfall has taught them some valuable lessons and also made them feel the emergence to reform the system. The basic reformation should begin from appointing new coaches as we felt it quite necessary at this moment to bring someone who can really teach the youth players how to play football or show us a unique style which we can adapt easily.  According to our observation the youth team have not been coached properly and the basic truth is that we do not have any basic principal or playing style that we used to follow very much during eelco’s time.

The present coaches’ squad is just full of average and unproductive people, who are not only inefficient but very much reluctant to acquire knowledge. Basically leaving Debraj Chatterjee the rest are not friendly and willing to learn new things. Thus working with such coaches can never be a good idea while you have a dream project to sustain. Hence we have taken the initiative to invite a well educated football coach , who is not only a holder of a  decent coaching license but also have some good amount of knowledge in coaching youth players with reputation in some popular youth teams. We are quite optimistic to brining a revolution in our style of football, just as we did earlier in 2012.

While setting a higher goal for ourselves to accomplish, where we may face the biggest difficulty, is raising fund. Considering the present financial circumstances of our country, it is fairly impossible to get even a sponsor who will willingly pay the salary of the foreign coach. Therefore we must form an agenda to raise some money but that too should be done in some very realistic way, not just following blindly the footsteps of the other organization without studying the market and understanding the situation where we belong.

Given the circumstance and necessity of raising fund we should layout our project with some very basic ideas like accumulating 5-8 lakh through souvenir cards and around 5 lakh from our resources where we can get a lump sum amount from 10-15 people. Lastly, we must approach several well-known companies who will at least sponsor 10 lakh. Without a doubt it can be said that being able to achieve the illustrated plan we can easily fulfill our target of bringing a foreign coach this year.

I hope, so far what I have shared has got some reality in it and helpful to overcome the crisis that we have been going through for last two years. Nevertheless to turn my plan into reality everyone has to work sincerely keeping their ego a side for a border prospect.