Diego Forlan writes a weekly column for The National, appearing each Friday. The former Manchester United, Inter Milan and Atletico Madrid striker has been the top scorer in Europe twice and won the Golden Boot at the 2010 World Cup. Forlan’s column is written with the assistance of European football correspondent Andy Mitten.
I played my first game in India on Tuesday for my new team Mumbai City in a 1-0 derby victory at Pune City. I enjoyed it and assisted our goal for our Argentine forward Matias Defederico, flicking the ball to him with my heel. It felt great to be part of a goal once again, I missed that feeling.
Like me, he once played for the mighty Independiente in Buenos Aires. He is 27, a decade younger than me and he also played for Argentina. Let’s hope we can combine well.
I started alone as a centre forward which was a challenge and meant I didn’t have many chances, but I dropped back and got involved in the game. My manager, the Brazilian Alexandre Guimaraes, seemed happy. He was the manager of Costa Rica in the 2002 and 2006 World Cups.
It was my first competitive game since June and I will get better with more matches, as will our new team which is still coming together. There are plenty of games in India – every three or four days over a two month period. My second one is Friday night, our first home game against North East United.
More from Diego Forlan:
• From August: My career will continue to grow in India, where football has room to grow
There is a game each evening in the Indian Super League, with each match televised at 7pm over 61 days. Interest is high and the average attendance across the whole league was 27,000 last year.
I arrived here after a few weeks pre-season training in the UAE. It was too hot to train in the day so we trained at night – including on the beach. Then we moved to Mumbai. I’m staying in a fantastic hotel and my family are with me, but while they visit the Taj Mahal and India’s various sites, I will see the country in another way as we fly about to matches.
It is the eighth country where I have played for a club and each has their own culture. In India, you have to give up your phone as you leave the team coach. Match fixing has been an issue here in the past and to avoid any betting there are no phones allowed in the dressing room. That’s a first for me, but I’m all for sport being clean.
Cricket is the most popular sport here. I watched a bit of it when I lived in England and while I couldn’t understand how two teams could play each other for five days and for the game to then be a draw, I liked it. I’m watching more here. You see cricket pitches everywhere. You also see sacred cows walking around the streets and the big contrast between the rich and the poor, but people of all classes seem to play and love cricket.
Football is becoming more popular and with a billion Indians, there is a huge potential for football here to improve – though it will take time. The average attendance makes the ISL one of the top 10 best supported leagues in the world and Kerala Blasters had a crowd of 64,900 on Wednesday, while Kolkata is a football city. The overall crowds are incredible for a country which is obsessed by cricket.
Some well known managers are out here: Marco Materazzi, Gianluca Zambrotta, Zico, Steve Coppell. And some well-known players.
Helger Postiga, Didier Zakora, Lucio, John Arne Riise, Florent Malouda, Aaron Hughes, Mohamed Sissoko and myself are the marquee players for the eight different teams. Eidur Gudjonsen was here but he got injured and had to go back home.
Each of the teams must sign between 8 and 10 foreign players. We were missing one this week, Sony Norde, a Haiti international who was with his country. He’s good. We have three Argentine players and four Brazilians, a Hungarian, Vadoc, who I played against in Spain when he was at Osasuna, and a Romanian central defender.
We have some good Indian players who will join up with us when they have finished playing games in the Asian confederation club matches. We communicate in English.
The standard is good, the physical pressures high. You don’t come here for a holiday and take it easy.
Nor do you come here thinking that you will dribble around six players and score. It’s physically demanding, with lots of experienced footballers who want to make a positive impression. They either want to come back next year or they want to show the world what they can do ahead of the January transfer window when they will be free agents. It’s a fantastic system for fitness because there are so many games.
That means there is a lot of travel as each team plays a minimum of 14 matches and there is a potential three more matches if we reach the semi-finals and final to decide who wins the tournament this year.
The fans are passionate, the people respectful and I’m loving the experience. The facilities are decent; the organisation levels for teams are high. I’ve not had too much of the classic Indian food yet, maybe the hot spices are not what I should be eating before running around for 90 minutes in often humid conditions.
Our team is co-owned by the Bollywood actor Ranbir Kapoor and I’m following in the boots of Nicolas Anelka, who was the marquee player (and manager) here last year. Freddie Ljungberg was the marquee player in the first season when the league started in 2014.
Mumbai City were seventh from eight in the first season and sixth last season. We’ve started well, let’s hope we can improve our position this year.
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