Football miracles: From Illness to Illinois

It is a typically warm Sunday morning in New Delhi as a 21-year-old girl — clad in a white shirt and matching shorts — anticipates a football approaching towards her across a patchy playground of a convent school. Standing about twenty yards off a goal post guarded by another young girl, the 21-year-old receives the incoming orb with a nimble touch of the inside of her right foot, before she gives the ball a slight nudge forward. She eyes the goalkeeper between the sticks with the vision of a seasoned predator until she finds what she has been looking for — a not so stealthy movement from the shot stopper towards the right — instinctive, perhaps, but revealing enough for the girl in white to strike the ball on the opposite side to find the back of a non-existent net.

It is basic textbook football for the more privileged lot of us —  deduce the opponents' movements and then beat them with an escape route that runs against their own motion. But when you take into consideration a child who contracted brain fever when she was all of six months performing these familiar moves of the beautiful game, you are left with nothing but admiration towards the sheer dedication that drives such players and towards the way of life that this sport itself is.

And for 21-year-old Pooja admiration comes of its own accord.

Diagnosed with brain fever after just six months of birth; recovering, only to be left with her hearing and speech impaired; denied admission into schools on account of her disability even as people suggested to her parents that she be given away to an orphanage, Pooja's life had entered into a shadow all too palpable to deal with. A deep misery seemed to have surrounded her family where the father, the owner of a little grocery store in Dwarka, was the sole bread-winner.

"We were concerned," says Sulakshana, Pooja's mother. "We did not know about her condition until one day her father kept on honking a vehicle horn with Pooja sitting just nearby. There was no reaction from her. That's when we knew that something was wrong.

"We sought treatment at a hospital in Delhi, but it seems the doctors there prescribed the wrong drugs which only worsened her condition," she adds.

The drugs might have done the damage, but hope does not always thrive on pharmaceuticals. It has surprising ways of operating, and that is how it took a nine-year-old Pooja and her parents to Asha Public School in Dwarka's Palam village. It was here that Pooja's shadows waned as she began to settle into a routine, finding solace in sports. By the time she was 14, she had become a part of Special Olympics  (SO) Bharat, a National Sports Federation that takes care of children with intellectual disabilities through sports.

The shadows have now disappeared and it is sunny as Pooja toys with the ball at the Frank Anthony School playground in Lajpat Nagar, which serves as a training hub for the Special Olympic Bharat athletes.

"She has improved a lot," says Raman Rekhi, senior manager of media and communications at SO Bharat. "Earlier, it was difficult to communicate with her. But now, she has grown into a better athlete which has helped her growth on an intellectual level too. In fact, she now communicates with her coach and even her teammates."

The coach, Suresh Kumar, reciprocates Rekhi's comments. Having looked after Pooja's development as an athlete since January 2017 with help from other coaches at Delhi's elite football club Delhi Dynamos, Kumar observes how his student's acquaintance with a football has developed into a benign friendship.

"Pooja always had a flair for sports," he begins, "but after we noticed her good footwork, we realised that football would be the way ahead for her to grow.

"Her skills, her shooting — everything has improved. She makes a conscious effort to every detail of the game. Her footwork is powerful. She even sets her position and liaises between me and other teammates."

Football indeed has been the way ahead for Pooja. In July, when the rest of the world will be waking up from a frenzied dream of a football World Cup, the 21-year-old girl from Delhi would be living her own fairytale in Chicago, Illinois with a ball by her feet as she competes in the maiden Unified Cup initiated by Special Olympics — the world's largest sports organisation for people with intellectual disabilities.

Alongside India (represented via SO Bharat), the tournament will see participation from Brazil, Slovakia, Kenya, Mexico, Korea and Egypt. Each team in the 'unified' competition will have volunteers playing alongside athletes with intellectual disabilities.

To Pooja, the prospect is an exciting one and she is likely to show it to you with a jubilant smile, an animated shrug of shoulders synchronised with side-to-side head movements as she gives you a 'thumbs up' after her mother conveys your question to her through hand gestures.

On the field however, the communication is a different one. It is Pooja's touches on the ball that do the talking. It makes you smile in admiration, you see. Admiration for a mother who says she is the first coach her daughter's day begins with — complete with a jog in the nearby park, some warm up exercises followed by a diet plan prescribed by coach Suresh. Admiration for the daughter herself, who forced the naysayers to swallow their words just like she forces a ball into the net.

With all that, you cannot help but think that football indeed is beautiful.