Kandivli-based football team, St Lawrence have been unstoppable at the Bengal Club-organised interschool tournament held at Shivaji Park. The team coached by former Mumbai footballer Laxman Singh Bisht were in blazing form in the quarter-finals where striker Bishar Parekh notched up a terrific hat-trick against Sri Ma Vidyalaya, Thane in a span of just seven minutes. They entered the finals confidently after securing a 4-0 win in the semis against St Paul’s, Dadar.
The team has been nothing but dominant in the tournament. A majority of the players come from families who do not support their footballing endeavours but that doesn’t stop them from persuing it. “I come from a family where education is given major impetus. I can’t blame them as we are a lower middle-class family; my father is a bus conductor. They expect me to study and get a job to provide,” says the hat-trick scorer Parekh.
St Lawrence is not just one of the many school teams that play in the Mumbai School Sports Association’s (MSSA) football tournaments. “Our teams from U-12, U-14 and U-16 play in the first division of MSSA. With very few facilities, we have managed to reach these heights,” says the coach, Bisht.
Even in the MSSA first division, the Kandivli lads kept registering thumping wins. One of those was a hammering against Swami Vivekanand International School with a 6-0 scoreline. Even after that victory, St Lawerence missed out by a point to qualify for
the next round on the U-16 I division.
“We lack the resources that are needed to build a great team. Despite this problem, one of our players, Ishan Rane, was picked by a German side along with sponsorship for a five-year training programme. His story is a rags to riches tale. Ishan used to live in a chawl like most of these kids and now he is living the life. I want all these kids to have something similar because all of them have great passion for the sport,” adds Bisht, who has been coaching the club for over 15 years.
St Lawrence has been facing troubles since a year after their training ground became public when the BMC scrapped the open ground policy, which originally allowed member-only clubs to take up grounds on lease and maintain them. Bisht explains, “We had the ground on lease for around 15 years where we maintained it and managed it for people other than our school kids. After the new policy coming into effect, the school has been negotiating with the BMC. The school campus is small and the kids need some decent place to practice.”
