If there is one game in the world to die for, it is definitely soccer. My passion for the game is as old as my days. I developed a fascination from very early and played in the junior school inter house competition at the age of ten. I still remember my sliding tackles in that game and what a girl, a spectator said to me post the game.

There is nothing more beautiful, more pleasurable – not even dating a beautiful girl – that comes close enough to running with the ball on wet grass on a noon in the beginning of winter, on a day when the sun slightly shows from behind the clouds and begins to kiss the day warm. Nothing more beautiful to get a good hold of the ball with the foot and shoot it.


There is something super special to taking a free kick. It is an art. When your studs hug your feet properly, and when you have had a sense of the roughness or the smoothness of the surface, you know that you are ready to have a go. Something magnificently beautiful there is to running at the precise angle, at the correct speed, and sweetly making contact with the ball with your right foot to sky it past the midfield to your forwards. When you do that, your right foot goes right across your body to the left, and you land on your left foot, balancing the act with the left arm outstretched. That is beautiful.


It is nothing less than godly to take defenders on and beat them in a battle of wits and agility. And to shoot the ball in the back of the nets is to taste the fruits of heaven.


It is nothing less than heroic to attempt a cycle kick. The best opportunity for that comes during a corner. It is attempted both while defending and attacking. Your right foot goes right above your body in an attempt to kiss the ball coming flying square (since its coming from the corner), while the left foot, slipping forward because of the swiftly moving body, loses its footing from the ground and you land balancing your body with your left arm and a bit of the right. Mostly a defender heads the ball before it reaches your ground, so the cycle goes in vain, only kicking the air. But that doesn’t take away the beauty of the attempt. Sometimes this skins the left elbow. While defending a corner, the player must needs heroically jump in the air when a cross is delivered, and sweetly make contact with the ball, and guide it towards the mid-field to nullify the attack. In between the rush of strikers and defenders, he must quickly find a way to run at the right angle and jump in the air as high as possible. A good jump is often executed so well, and so heroically that no thought goes into where and how one would land, one only cares for the upward flight, not the downward descent. So, a good fall is what results but if one is witty enough, it is almost never accompanied by a bruise. That is beautiful.


When the stage is set for the final of a tournament, with the spectators all on, and one of them your special-someone, few things in your life will come close to the joy of winning the game, and more than that, to help your side win it. The joy turns a thousand fold reverberating in the ground. The youthful winter will haunt you till the end of your days, and leaving all else, you will want to return to the smell of wet grass and beaten leather, so filling your seventeen-year-old lungs with the cool wind, you can die in peace!!!