Credits THE HINDU NEWS JULY 03, 2018
The sight of bullock carts ferrying construction debris to Vyasarpadi in the dead of night is still fresh in football coach N Thangaraj’s mind. It was 1995 and around 150 young men from the locality came together to level a pond in B Kalyanapuram to construct a football ground. They were not part of any formal group, and just called themselves ‘Vyasarpadi Youth’.
“It took us two years to create the ground,” recalls 54-year-old Thangaraj. “Back then, there was no place to play football in Vyasarpadi. We poured whatever mud and sand we could gather into the pond, little by little every day. At night, we went looking for construction debris dumped on roadsides,” he says. The debris was ferried on bullock carts whose owners were kind enough to support their cause. “Once the pond was levelled, we took turns to keep night vigils to protect it from miscreants,” he says. Their labour of love — the first football ground in Vyasarpadi — exists even today, but is inside a school compound.