May 15 came and went. The Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) remained unperturbed. The date is AFC’s Grassroots Day, a day when the member associations of Asia’s football governing body encourage youngsters to take up the game.

It took PFF a day to realise it had just committed a gaffe. With June 30’s presidential elections upon it, where incumbent Faisal Saleh Hayat’s former ally Zahir Ali Shah is challenging him, and the PFF being largely slammed for its ‘electioneering’, it knew it had to rectify its blunder.

And then, as PFF usually works, a news release was issued on Saturday that it will “celebrate the Grassroots Day tomorrow [on Sunday] at the Model Town Football Academy (MTFA) in Lahore”.

It is this attitude that has seen Pakistan football suffer over the years, a fact that Holger Obermann insisted upon when he came to Pakistan nearly a decade ago till this day.

“Now, I feel, the PFF or the government does not give enough attention to football,” FIFA’s Overseas Development Coach, who came to Pakistan three times between 2005 to 2007 for development projects, told Dawn in an e-mail interview on Sunday.

Obermann, who was given the German Football Ambassador award in 2013, first came to Pakistan for a project in which he aimed to help eradicate child labour from the sports goods making industry in Sialkot and give those children a footballing future.

He helped those children form an U-16 team there but then a catastrophe saw him reach out to children in Kashmir. He was FIFA’s main man for their crisis relief ‘Football for Hope’ project in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck in October 2005. He remembers that experience quite vividly.

“I travelled all over Kashmir to help the earthquake victims,” he recalls. “We played football just shortly after the disaster, and we played daily with 100 children – many of whom were traumatised, they had lost their homes and their family members in the earthquake. Football can do a lot … a little bit of joy returned for those children during those days as did a bit of hope for the future.”

During those three-week ‘Football for Hope’ clinics, Obermann interacted closely with Pakistani youth. He was amazed at the interest, and the potential, he saw amongst the youth.

“I had a marvellous experience with the youngsters in Pakistan,” he said. “They were well-mannered and I spoke a lot with them after the sessions. In 2006, I visited the MTFA in Lahore which had an excellent programme for several age groups and a year later when I was involved with the U-16 team in Karachi, I saw some fantastic talent – good in skills and high in spirits.”

But that talent has so far been unable to rise, largely due to the PFF’s inability to complete what it proudly says ‘eight Goal projects’ it has received since 2004. Only the PFF House in Lahore is complete. The one in Peshawar is long gone and the other six are expected to be completed by the end of this year. Till date, the PFF doesn’t have a training or playing facility of its own.

“I feel foreign coaches should come more often to Pakistan, not necessarily for the national team but for coaching the youth teams,” Obermann reckons. “The PFF should pay more attention to youth development programmes, the slogan for that should be ‘Catch Them Young’.”

For that, the PFF needs to complete the Goal projects it already has and Obermann is willing to push for more. FIFA gave $500,000 for a training centre as part of its Goal project in Kashmir’s capital of Muzzafarabad, which was shifted to Peshawar. The PFF received an additional $200,000 by the AFC for it but the project, awarded in 2006, lies in ruins.

“Proper training centres are the need of the hour,” he says. “I know from experience, that FIFA was always willing to push for youth programmes for countries in need. As a FIFA advisor, I can try to approach the people in Zurich [where FIFA’s headquarters are based] to do more for Pakistan football. But the PFF needs to have the impetus to complete those projects.”

Obermann’s influence in Kashmir was such that had the PFF worked diligently on completing the Goal project there, or even in Peshawar for that matter, the potential the German had seen amongst the kids there almost a decade ago would’ve come to fruition by now.

A day after Pakistan were hammered 5-0 by Jordan in their AFC U-23 Championship qualifier, the 78-year-old Obermann told Dawn that he had indeed been offered the post of head-coach by Hayat back then but he was unable to take it as he had already signed a contract with Malaysia.

A day later, Pakistan lost 2-0 to Kuwait in the said qualifiers, leaving Pakistan without competitive football for the next four years having already lost in the first round of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers, which merged with it the preliminaries for the 2019 Asian Cup.

If the PFF had carried out the work in Kashmir that Obermann had started, if he had joined Pakistan as national team coach — It’s nothing new for Pakistan football which has seen plenty of ‘what if’ moments.

Published in Dawn, May 21th, 2015

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