The Hindu : 58 players for AIFF's 'fitness for football'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jun 09, 2003

Sport

Sport - Football

58 players for AIFF's 'fitness for football'

By Our Sports Reporter

KOLKATA JUNE 8. The football in the country appears to be on the upswing. With the world body — FIFA — including India in its prestigious `Goal' programme and pumping in a million-dollar grant for the development of the sport, the first step in its realisation has been taken up by the All India Football Federation under the name of "fitness for football".

This central sports medicine and fitness programme — which comes up here at the SAI Eastern Centre between June 9 and 12 — is an unique effort and seeks to dwell on various aspects of a player's physical and psychological development.

The centralised programme will be followed by similar such programmes in the zonal centres — Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore and Goa (Margao) — which will have their own specialised teams to conduct the tests on the regional players at least twice a year, informed the chairman of AIFF sports medicine programme Dr. Vece Paes.

The two other key figures overseeing this programme will be the AIFF secretary Mr. Alberto Colaco and the national coach Stephen Constantine. The "fitness for football'' agenda — definitely a major one to be dealt in just four days — has peak performance programme, initiation of the `player data bank', medical fitness test including systemic, orthopaedic and cardio logical evaluation and physical fitness tests specific for soccer.

Regarding the data bank, the AIFF plans to launch a web-site that can be accessed by all the clubs who would get to know the update of the players' bio-data — general, technical skills, medical and physical fitness — on assessments done by the various experts at different points of time, informed Dr. Paes.

The important feature of this programme is that the wards will be made aware of FIFA doping policy and testing procedures. This apart, there will be field-training methods, exogenous factors that support training and co-ordination of sports medicine team — both national and regional.

Apart from Dr. Paes as the course director and National coach Constantine, there will be Dr. P.S.M. Chandran, senior scientific officer, SAI, and Dr. Thomas Chandy, sports medicine and orthopaedic consultant, National Cricket Academy as the course tutors.

The AIFF announced selection of 58 `national' players picked from the senior, under-23 and under-17 teams.

The list: Ishfaq Ahmed, K. Ajayan, Naseem Akhtar, Alex Ambrose, Jo Paul Ancheri, Roque Barreto, Satish Kumar Bharti, Bhaichung Bhutia, Jatin Singh Bisht, Ashim Biswas, Subhas Chakraborty, Sunil Chetri, Alvito D'Cunha, Jules Alberto Dias, Selwyn Fernandes, Rajat Ghosh Dastidar, Debjit Ghosh, Mahesh Gawli, Khalid Jamil, Vinu Jose, Abhay Kumar, Praveen Kumar, V.P. Satish Kumar, Climax Lawrence, Arun Malhotra, S. Malswamtulunga, Dipak Kumar Mondal, Sangram Mukherjee, Syed Rahim Nabi, Sameer Naik, Sandip Nundy, Dipankar Roy, Sheikh Sanjib, Peter Siddique, Harpreet Singh, L. Mani Tomba Singh, Lolendro Singh, Renedy Singh, Sukhwinder Singh, Tomba Singh, Y. Raju Singh, M. Suresh, S. Venkatesh, I.M. Vijayan, Noel Wilson, Abhishek Yadav, Arpan Dey, Jitu Chetri, Surjokiran Chakraborty, Surkumar Singh, Chandan Das, Sasthi Duley, Shankarlal Chakraborty, Raman Vijayan, Tushar Rakshit, Subhashish Roy Chowdhury, Sujoy Dutta, Jahan Mehta.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Sport

Stories in this Section

Cricket

Scotland gives Pakistan a scare

May the NCA go from strength to strength

Tennis

Fairytale finish for Ferrero

Football

Awesome display by Goa, Kerala

Spain loses to Greece

58 players for AIFF's 'fitness for football'

Beckham's affair with United could be coming to a close

Athletics

Another setback for Greene — a distant third

Chess

Rahul Sangma, Jayasree taste defeat

Wrestling

Iranian grapplers in limelight