CHARLES D'SOUZA
MARGAO
Rosary Higher Secondary School, Navelim will meet Sainik School in the 57th edition of the famous competiton in India - Under 17 Subroto Mukherjee Cup international football tournament on Octobe 4 in New Delhi. Subroto Cup Football Tournament is an All India inter-school football tournament, organised by Subroto Mukherjee Sports Education Society.
This tournament was the brainchild of (late) Air Marshal Subroto Mukerjee. He conceived the idea of launching a football tournament, at junior level, in 1958, the year when he was the Chief of the Air Staff. Being an ardent soccer lover himself, he believed that football needed to be encouraged at grassroot level, in order to promote and realize its growth at national and international level. Unfortunately, he died untimely, in 1960. However, his concept lived on in the form of Subroto Mukherjee Sports Education Society, established in the very same year.
At the time of inauguration of its first tournament, which was also held in 1960, the then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, offered a tribute to this great visionary and named the tournament after the late Air Marshal. Thus, began the journey of the Subroto Cup Football Tournament, held every year, since then.
Over the years, the scope of the tournament has been widened to include foreign participation as a logical step forward in an endeavour to encourage budding footballers, and offer them international exposure at a tender age. As a result of this, teams from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Israel, Bhutan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Ukraine have participated in this tournament in the recent past. Rosary Higher Secondary coach cum physical education teacher Oswald D'Costa asserts that this team is the fittest. "We are in the final stages of our preparations and I can confidently say that we are on the right track. I have coached the team earlier in the Subroto Mukherjee football tournament and I can say that this team is the balanced squad and also mentally tough," stated D'Costa. According to Oswald the exposure at the inter higher secondary football tournament will help them access where the team stands in the tournament and also gives them enough time to fine tune certain grey areas. "In our group there are strong teams and our first target is to reach the quarterfinal," D'Costa said.
"From my assessment of watching these players over couple of months, I feel this team has great capacity to beat the best teams in the tournament. We have used some rigorous training methods over couple of months and have emphasized on match preparations not just tactically and technically but also mentally. In New Delhi we will get to see how the players cope with the pressure of playing best teams of the country,” he added.
