A history of Tibetan football, starting from polo In Lhasa
Dharamsala, 12 August 2003:
Well, talking about Tibetan football, here’s a short history. The Tibetan word for football or for that matter for any ball has been colonised by the British Raj as polo. And hence the horseback sport.
For some if this sounds too far-fetched here’s a real piece of history. And I am excerpting, excerpting from Patrick French’s book called Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, published this year.
... For the British, football became a way of passing the days. They were challenged to a match by a home side called ‘Lhasa United’, composed of three bearded Ladakhis wearing red fezzes, a Chinese tailor, a Nepalese soldier and five of Tibet’s leading young aristocrats, including Yuthok and Taring, both former commanders of the Trongdra or ‘Better Families’ Regiment’, who ‘still had their charm –boxes on top of their heads, so were precluded from heading the ball’. The ‘Mission Marmots’ included four sahibs, their Sikkimese clerks and a handful of Tibetan servants, including the star player, who wore gym shoes and a long plait...
The mission’s secretary, Freddy Spencer Chapman, thought the pitch, framed by snow-flecked hills and the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, the Norbulinka, had ‘as lovely a setting as any ground in the world’.
Well, Chapman reported and said that the un-invited guests won the game by only one goal. And we only have his word for it. The actual battle was lost several weeks earlier. And we have the word of the Tibetan people on this.
Patrick French continues... The pace of the game was aided by the long, high kicks that could be achieved in the thin air. Things proceeded happily for several weeks, ‘until some wandering rogue stole our goal-posts for firewood, but by that time there were always sand-storms in the afternoons, so we decided the football season was over...
As I have said, we only have the British word for Lhasa’s football season being declared over. Subsequent research reveals the British team ran out of oxygen on the world’s highest football field.
In exile
And this is only proved by how well our boys did in the football tournaments that were the annual craze in Kalimpong and Darjeeling in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. They were playing Sikkim United, Bhutan 11, Nepal Royals and the Bengal Tigers, all with well-deserved reputations of ferocity. And what talents we produced! The Tsarong brothers, who between the two of them invented the banana kick, later perfected by Pele. Yeshi Bashi, of Tibetan inspiration and Indian training who represented India at the ’72 Asian Games in Bangkok. And we would like to stake a claim on the real name of Buchung in India’s Baichung Bhutia.
If they did so well, I am sure our present team will do it again. Or at least we will never have to worry that the Tibetan team will run out of oxygen.
