Anisur Rahman

A group of talented girls unexpectedly stormed onto headlines in 2015 and their success, including advancing to the 2017 finals of AFC U-16 Women’s Championship, and brilliant performances have continued silently as the Tricotex Women’s Football League has failed to attract spectators in the new normal.

When news of Diego Armando Maradona’s passing filtered through on the night of November 25 in Bangladesh, the grief that took hold in the country was as if a mischievous, magnetic boy next door died and not a footballing genius who lived 10,000 miles away and imbued everything he touched with the brightest colours.

The supporters of Mohammedan SC don’t flock to the Motijheel-based tent of the Black and Whites to watch their favourite footballers like they once used to during the glory days of football. But today, the Mohammedan supporters once again gathered at the club tent, obviously not to see a new football sensation rather bid goodbye to the great Badal Roy.

The historical success stories of Bangladesh swimming and, by extrapolation, of Bangladesh sports, will remain incomplete without Mosharraf Hossain Khan, who is thecountry’s lone sportsman to grab five gold (100m butterfly, 200m butterfly,

“People of this generation may not believe it, but there was a time when I started the journey from Teroghada upazila at midnight and travelled the 34 kilometres to Sheikh Abu Naser Stadium in Khulna on a rickshaw van, accompanied by my grandfather,” said former seven-time sprint champion Sultana Parveen Lovely.

Irregularity in staging lower division football leagues and district football leagues has been one of the major areas of criticism of Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) President Kazi Salahuddin in his past three tenures.

A group of brilliant young footballers put Bangladesh prominently on the map of age-level women’s football, especially in South Asia, by clinching the first-ever AFC U-14 Girls’ Regional Championship in December 2015.

The newly elected Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) committee may not reflect the expectations of the general football fans, but the much talked-about polls produced nine new faces who are all set to work along long-serving BFF organisers, including four-time President Kazi Salahuddin for the next four years.

The annual general meeting is a forum where delegates capitalise on the opportunity to reflect on the obstacles and achievements of the past year, and to voice their opinions on decisions that will affect the direction of the sport.

As the country is gradually stirring back to life amid the threat of the coronavirus, the country’s sports fraternity too seems to be preparing to wake up.

Social distancing and Covid-19 transmission are evidently not high on the list of concerns. For these workers, at an iron foundry in Shyampur, the most pressing issue in life is earning the basic living that would allow them to put food on the table back home.

Lack of professionalism in both the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) and the clubs, combined with the dysfunction in the Football Players’ Welfare Association (FPWA) has seemingly paved the way to the unpleasant decision of big pay cuts of footballers in the upcoming season, expected to start in December.

The Daily Star (DS): You are contesting for the president’s post of Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) for a fourth successive term. What has prompted you to run again?

“Football is now a platform for fake organisers to draw cheap publicity,” Manzoor Hossain Malu lamented.

Despite little engagement at national and international stage last year and lower division competitions and youth development remaining irregular, the Bangladesh Football Federation’s administrative expenditure increased 30 percent in the last fiscal.

Asked why their relationship had suddenly deteriorated after running the federation in tandem for nearly six years, Nazimuddin and Intekhabul blamed each other.

Football in the country was set to emerge from the four-and-a-half-month coronavirus-induced slumber last week as national players joined the training camp for the Joint Qualifiers for World Cup and Asian Cup, but FIFA and AFC’s decision on Wednesday to postpone the October-November window has plunged the sport into uncertainty once more.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a persistent fear has been that of false negatives -- cases of those infected with the transmissible virus testing negative and being allowed to carry on with their regular lives, risking further infection.

The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) will allow its member associations to hold the upcoming Joint Qualifiers for the 2022 World Cup and 2023 Asian Cup in the presence of full spectators, limited spectators or without spectators amid the coronavirus pandemic.

After the Bangladesh Hockey Federation (BHF) elections in April 2019, there were high hopes that the new leadership would get the Premier Hockey League (PHL) back on track but those fond hopes have proved to be unfounded so far, and the coronavirus pandemic has plunged the league into further uncertainty.