With assist from Kashmiri greats, Suhail Ahmad Bhat makes his way from Srinagar to Indian football team

Indian Express

3 days ago

Suhail Ahmad Bhat was in a cradle, just two months old, when Sunil Chhetri first played for India in June 2005. 'Imagine,' the 20-year-old blushes, 'now I am sharing the dressing room with him.'
On the first day, he was 'gripped by nerves'. 'We were doing rondos (a passing drill). I was so afraid… I kept telling myself, 'Don't make any mistake!'' Chhetri, one of India's all-time greats, sensed the anxiety and put his arm around Bhat's shoulders. He told the fellow forward, half his age, 'This is your first national camp, just smile.'
Since then, the smile has remained plastered on Bhat's youthful face. He knows he is on the cusp of something rare — to rise from the Valley and reach the pinnacle: to play for India.
Bhat is a part of the 28-man travelling squad for India's twin matches against Thailand and Hong Kong on June 4 and 10, respectively. If he gets picked, he will become only the fourth player from Jammu and Kashmir to represent India after Abdul Majeed Kakroo, Mehrajuddin Wadoo and Danish Farooq.
Without these three, Bhat probably wouldn't have reached this far.
In a way, Bhat's story is also the story of Kashmir football, at least in the last two decades and the origins can be traced to a protest back on a pleasant spring day in 2007. The story goes that the then J&K chief minister, Gulam Nabi Azad, was considering converting Srinagar's primary football facility, the TRC Ground, into a tulip garden.
Kakroo, the first player from Kashmir to captain India in the 1980s, had seen how one football ground after another in Srinagar had disappeared before his eyes to development projects. If TRC Ground met the same fate, Kakroo was convinced it would spell the end of football in Srinagar.
Incensed, he took it upon himself to 'save the stadium'. 'I had two South Asian Games gold medals, and I said I would burn myself outside the secretariat,' he had told The Indian Express in an earlier interview. Nabi, eventually, relented. And the TRC Ground would become the site where Kashmir's football dreams blossomed.
It was developed into a cute little stadium with a top-grade artificial surface that could survive the bitter winters. A decade later, it became home to one of the most romantic chapters in Indian football.
Real Kashmir — a club born out of a natural calamity, the floods of 2014 — took the domestic scene by storm, winning the second division and becoming the first club from J&K to play in the top division of Indian football.
Those were heady days for football in Kashmir and Farooq, a no-nonsense midfielder, was one of the poster boys. The club's ardent fan base would create an atmosphere that made the opposition quake in their boots. Bhat was one of the faces in the crowd back then, accompanying his father, Mohammad Abdullah Bhat, for the matches.
The football bug, he says, bit him at an early age. 'My father played football, so I was drawn to the game naturally when I was very young,' Bhat says.
Father's dream
Abdullah's day job was as a labourer and a vegetable vendor. Once the sun set, though, the self-confessed football tragic travelled long distances to play matches. 'I had no coaching or no club as such. A few of us from the neighbourhood formed a team and played wherever we got an opportunity. I played barefoot for most of my life,' he says.
Abdullah takes pride that two out of his three sons went on to become doctors. But there's pure, unbridled joy in his voice that at least one of them — Suhail — picked football as a career. 'I couldn't play beyond a local level,' says Bhat Sr. 'But when my son started taking an interest in the sport, I told him to pursue his dream without any fear.'
It helped that by then, an ecosystem had developed. Beyond the glamour of big-time football that Real Kashmir brought to Srinagar, Wadoo silently began to develop the next-gen players at the state football academy, at the TRC Ground.
'Growing up, we didn't have many coaches or a set pathway for someone to make a career in football. So, I wanted to do something for football in Kashmir and the state football academy was a part of that plan,' says Wadoo, who spearheaded the project.
Bhat was 14 when he joined the academy. 'Like a lot of players in Kashmir, Suhail is physically very strong and has this quality to fight for the ball inside the box, never shy of doing that. And then, he was very disciplined. He never missed training,' Wadoo says.
Such was their obsession, that Abdullah was even prepared to change his son's school to ensure he didn't miss training. 'One time, the school teachers made him sit there till 3pm. The evening training would start at 3.30, so if he stayed till the end, he would have missed the session. So, I told the authorities that if they did not leave him at 2, we'd change his school,' Abdullah laughs. 'They were cooperative.'
Like Wadoo and Ishfaq Ahmad, who reached the India U-23 level, Bhat left the Valley when he was in his teens to chase his dreams. He swiftly rose through the ranks, representing India at all age-group levels. His physicality in the box and strong mentality earned him a contract with Indian Super League champions Mohun Bagan.
Bhat has yet to score for his club. But with India desperate to find a reliable striker, so much so that Chhetri had to return from retirement this year to fill the void he left, coach Manolo Marquez turned to the rookie striker from Srinagar.
For Bhat, the magnitude of this is still sinking in. 'In 2019, when an 'India Stars' team came to Srinagar for an exhibition match against a J&K team, Amrinder (Singh) Paaji was the goalkeeper. And I was a 14-year-old ball boy, standing behind Paaji's goalpost,' he says. 'This week, I was training with him. It's all a bit surreal.'