Nurungukal…..

      When I think of football the first name that comes to my mind is Sait Nagji foot ball tournament at Manchira in Kozhikode. The only event we fondly  awaited to happen apart from the annual exhibition at Zamorin’s ground. Unlike now, we never went to put up holding along the streets of Kozhikode. To be frank I never even bothered to know about the records made by the legendaries around the world. Now when you here the running commentary of a match  the stalwarts can tell you how many times a player had taken his breadth in 90 minutes of play and how tenderly he might have thought about the twins he would have while playing a crucial match. The only thing that bothered us was, from whom  we can sqeeze  few chips to by the tickets. It can be possibly by selling the news paper without the knowledge of our sister-in-law or by surreptitiously extracting some loose notes from our brother’s pocket. We neither had sufficient funds to put up a flex costing thousands of rupees, nor had the time. We were happy  if we could manage to enter the arena with a cone of fried pea nuts. But we were lucky in those days to enjoy the  live performance  of the famous Indian player like Thankaraj, Goswamy,Chidanandan, Zulphikkar, Olympian Rahman etc. etc.  We were satisfied with the commentary of Padmanabettan or with the review of Wimzy in Sport and Pastime. Invariably on many an occasion we had to be contend with enjoying the roar from inside the stadium while leaning on the parapet wall of Mananchitra, embrazing a cool breeze from the beach. If inside the performance of many a permanent spectators who used to station at designated spots added spice to our enjoyment. Suicides and quarrels were unheard of in those days.

      There are many like me in this part of kerala and world over anxiously expecting that the Sait Nagji  tourney would be revived to provide an annual fiesta  and more over to encourage the local young talents. Let those who spend thousands   for those who earn in crores think of creating a corpus fund to bring back a lost glory of Malabar.