This age-old tournament not getting any younger!

Sri Vyas Bal Mandir, Neemuch (MP) took the field withjust 10 players and got thrashed 17-0 by St Stephen's School (Chandigarh) in theSubroto Mukherjee sub-junior (U-14) football tournament here on Friday. Withjust 10 players clearing the medical test, the MP school was earlier onThursday, blanked 13-0 by Namchi Sports Hostel (Sikkim).With thesub-junior matches just into the sixth day of the competition, 58 players havealready been disqualified for being overage and four teams have been scratched!While schools from Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Manipur have been shown the dooras 13, 10 and 14 of their players respectively failed the age test, a schoolfrom Goa withdrew after being left with just nine players.The storyhasn't been much different in the junior (U-17) group. Defending champions Nepalfailed to turn up, Assam and Punjab also did not arrive and around 50 playerswere disqualified. While last year's runners-up Tripura fielded a differentschool's team this year, semifinalists Chandigarh could not even go beyond thegroup stage. If that isn't the writing on wall for the tournamentwhose organisers have been planning to get school teams from Brazil, Argentinaand Italy, then what is? Wing commander Arijit Ghosh, secretary, Subroto CupFootball Society, admitted that "there have been some disappointments" thisyear, but he maintained that the tournament hasn't suffered due toorganisational lapses. "If we speak in terms of percentage, therehave been some 20 per cent overage cases in U-14 category and around 10 per centin the U-17. So it's still 1.6 player per team, and we can't do much if thestates behave in this manner despite knowing the guidelines well," Ghoshsaid.Though one of the oldest running tournaments in the country,Subroto Cup has lost much of its sheen and ironically, an attempt to curb the"overage menace" has resulted in unprecedented disqualifications and withdrawalsthis year. Also, there was talk last year of letting good teams play for full 90minutes instead of an hour. That has not been done so far. "We can certainlyintroduce that from quarters stage onwards," Ghosh said.