Goa lost all five of their matches in the Santosh Trophy final round league stage, forcing the state football enthusiasts to wonder whether the State, which has football as its official sport, are the new whipping boys at the National Championships.
While Goans have been claiming that football flows in our blood, the results on the field have been declining steadily and hit the rock bottom by going down to minnows Gujarat and crashing out of Santosh Trophy in the Qualifying Round last season.
This year, five-time champions Goa headed into the Santosh Trophy with renewed vigour and coach Norbert Gonsalves also sounded confident about a better return! His boys did make progress and cleared the qualifying hurdle in Assam and made it to the final round in Odisha.
It was there in Bhubaneswar that the real Goa needed to turn up, but what we saw was shocking. The essence of Goa football prowess was generally absent, and the boys had no clue in terms of technical authority as well as tactical grip in what proved to be a meek display against Kerala (2-3), Odisha (1-4), Karnataka (0-2), Punjab (1-3) and today in the last match against Maharashtra (0-2).
Goa is hurting from the long-running saga of bad performances in Santosh Trophy where once upon a time, the State was tagged as one of the contenders for the title, the last of which came in 2008-09 season.
Goa, who have a total of 13 appearances in the finals to their credit in an illustrious past, last made it to the summit in 2016 when the hosts went down to traditional rivals West Bengal. There after, the ride has been full of struggles.
So, how can the rot be stemmed and an upward trajectory be shaped? Seeking a remedy and taking the decisions, is undoubtedly the task for Goa Football Association to execute and the governing body for state football needs to be sure of what they are doing especially as the new executive committee led by president Caitano Fernandes is at the helm of the GFA affairs since last three months or so. And they need to get the best of the former Goa football heroes and senior coaches’ ideas onboard alongside understanding scientific way of youth development; and plan a positive approach that will revamp the process of putting together Santosh Trophy campaigns in future.
Decline happens very gradually and sometimes like a sudden change in health it shows its symptoms. Goan football has been on decline for sometime now. One cannot blame, the players, the coaching staff, nor the current GFA. However, someone needs to take the responsibility for it and not pass the bucks to the next person and in this case it has to be the current GFA. It’s time to do something different and raise the bar once again to it’s old glory days…