FIFA U-17 World Cup: Pedigree hunting in Kerala

Hoardings featuring Rahul have sprung up in his native Ollukkara, along the Thrissur-Palakkad Road. (Express Photo by Sandip G)

The year Rahul was born, his father Praveen Kannoly, revamped his ancestral house. He wanted a name for the house, besides the family name Kannoly, a regular practice in Kerala. His wife, Bindu Praveen, suggested ‘Sreyas’, which means fame. For soon after Rahul was born, an astrologer had predicted that he would become famous. “Globally,” his mother interjects. It now sounds quite apt, too, what with their son on the brink of playing the U-17 World Cup.
The first thing that strikes you about the tiny but neat visitor’s room of ‘Sreyas’ is a blue statute of Lord Krishna. He is swarmed by a cluster of trophies. You’d assume, in a footballer’s house, it might be the trophies he had accumulated at school or club. “Whatever we get, we dedicate it to him (Krishna). It’s all his grace,” says Bindu. Only that the trophies were not hoarded by the young midfielder, rather his father Praveen, who runs a kennel, and who the residents of Ollukkara, a quaint speck on the Thrissur-Palakkad Road, consult for anything and everything related to dogs. A doctor, consultant and handler, all rolled into one.

Praveen, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, is restlessly swiping his thumb through different pictures on his new smart-phone.

He pauses and turns the phone around. On the screen was the photograph of an impish-looking pit-bull terrier. “The other day, when I called him (Rahul), he said he wanted a sturdier dog, something like a pit-bull terrier. Initially, he was obsessed with Siberian husky, but I thought it was a little meek. The next day, he might say he wants a doberman. I tell him don’t worry about dogs, you win the World Cup and we’ will have both Siberian husky and pit-bull terrier,” Praveen says.

The winning-the-World-Cup rider irritates Rahul. “Whenever the World Cup topic comes, he tries to evade us, maybe that’s why he deliberately brings in the topic of dogs, for he knows I can keep talking for hours on dogs,” says Praveen, whose kennel houses nearly 20 dogs, most of which are pugs and beagles. Almost every other month, he takes them to dog shows around the country, and hasn’t missed the Bangkok dog festival in the last 10 years. The trophies on the teapoy of the visitor’s room and the shelf in the dining room were all collected by Praveen’s dogs in various competitions.

He says it’s not a lucrative business, and gets “just enough money” to sustain the family of four. “It’s a rich man’s hobby. But I got accidentally hooked to. Whatever I’ve made and whatever I’ve lost it’s because of them. Now because of them, I can’t even go to watch my son play. In fact, I’ve never seen him play live,” he says, in his quintessential singsong twang of Thrissur, with a tendency to unnecessarily slip in an English word (almost always in plural), in every sentence.

Rahul’s parents Praveen Kannoly and Bindu at their residence in Ollukkara. (Express Photo by Sandip G)

His wife and daughter persuaded him to travel to Delhi and watch Rahul play — AIFF in fact had arranged for the tickets and accommodation as well — but Praveen can’t imagine staying away from his dogs. “I told them I will be very nervous watching him live. I get so tensed that I might even get a heart attack at the stadium. I will watch it here on the television, so if the tension becomes unbearable I can at least switch it,’’ he says. But the rest of the family knows that the tension bit is just an excuse.

In Rahul’s childhood, his mother was happy that he wasn’t too inclined to dogs like his father. She wanted him to firmly focus on academics and procure a government job or become an engineer (the noughties was time of technocrat boom in Kerala). So she was rather happy to see him hang around his uncle (father’s brother), Pradeep, a failed footballer, who now drives an auto.

“Rahul will go with him and would be away for hours. He used to take textbooks also with him. So I thought he will be studying in the shade or something. But one day, I saw him playing with men of his uncle’s age. I stood speechless,” she reminiscences. Pradeep got a earful from his brother, but he convinced Praveen about the boy’s potential and begged him to give him formal training. “This happened when he was nine or 10. Then I also realised that I got no moral right to advice him, for I was someone who went behind my passion, despite my parents advising against it,” he says.

But other than enrolling him at a nearby academy, he hardly bothered about what he was learning there, or if he was learning anything at all there. Even now, it’s the essence of their relationship. “I don’t ask him how many goals he has scored or whether he’s playing well. We talk about general things, like places, his new friends and of course dogs. Wherever he goes, he sends me picture of different breeds. Then I google the pictures and find which breed they are,” he says. However, Rahul’s mother and sister keep inquiring him about his performances. But Rahul, his father says, allays them without any fuss. “This is nothing mom. It’s just the start. We have bigger goals. She will nod her head, seemingly happy and then after he ends the call begins to cry,” he says.

He admits that sometimes he too feels like crying, more so as Rahul has been mostly away since he was inducted into the AIFF Academy in Goa. “I was surprised when the AIFF people asked me to get him the passport. I wondered why a 14-year-old needs a passport. Last month, he came here to append the passport,” he says, even now disbelievingly.

The showcase glass has cello-tape stains, presumably of posters . “Those are of the posters, she forced me to remove it,” he says. His wife clarifies it, “You could understand if Rahul pastes posters of footballers, he’s young, but what do you do when his father starts pasting pictures of dogs?” Praveen, meanwhile, has resumed browsing on his smart phone. This time, he’s searching for a stye remover for dogs. His wife is mulling on another visit to the astrologer who predicted Rahul’s “global” surge.