I do remember reading on an article somewhere that in war torn Sudan where society had broken apart and lawlessness was rampant, one of the remedies to introduce the people of Sudan to the importance of living in a society of law was Football. but you also play to win, which means someone has to lose, but you have to play and abide by rules. You cannot use your hand and put a ball into the goal, you simply cannot beat up your opponent either or curse him with foul language, that would get you a yellow card which is a warning or a red card wherein you will be forced to get off the field. Hence, if you want to win, you have to behave and abide by the rules.

In a country like India, there are many times when we, the people discard the rules and laws of the country, you often see people disobeying traffic rules, bribing the government officials for simple matters like getting a no objection certificate from the regional transport officer or getting a ration card from government officials. Our lax attitude towards laws and rules reflects not only in our traffic but in the way our cities are planned, no proper drainage, dirt everywhere, buildings built haphazardly. But to be fair to the people, sometimes the government or in this case the referees are also unfair, the very people who should be giving us the yellow and red cards are the people who are the first people to disobey the law. Just because you a VIP, you can jump the traffic light, just because you are an important bureaucrat or a politician, you do not have to abide with certain municipal laws in construction of your houses. What happens next is that we the people also start to feel that it's okay to break the rules sometimes, and in a society where there is no proper enforcement of rules, you become a loser if you want to stick and obey the rules because when you stand in line and everyone else jumps the line, you become the last person to get tickets or rations and are left with nothing, when you want to get permit to transfer registration of your vehicle from one state to another without paying bribe, you have to wait for 6 months or more because these referees make your run pillar to post because you don't want to break the rules. India is a great country with lots of good laws and rules, but all these laws and rules are pretty useless without enforcement. What would it be like if you watched a football match, where the referee openly support one team against the other and overlooked hand ball, a hard tackle which deserved a yellow card with just a free kick, you would lose interest in the game. Maybe, if more Indians took to sports and have the sportsman spirit, we will try to follow and rules and accept them and yes, that includes all of us, the public and the people who enforce and make the laws.

One of the most important thing in sports and in football as a whole is to accept losing a game, to understand that losing a game does not equate with failure in life, that sometimes we need to learn to fail before we learn to succeed, that sometimes we learn to succeed from lessons that we learned in failure. It is sad now a days to see people as well as political parties who never accept that they are wrong, that they are always right ever when they are wrong, they feel that if they admit the sky will drop down and they will lose face but sometimes it is in accepting defeat that we can have dignity, dignity that we did not cheat or manipulate to win. It's important in a society and culture of our country also to sometimes say that we may have made some mistakes and we need to fix this, if we are always right, when will we ever review our mistakes and try to improve our self. It's this small setbacks which teach us where we are weak and where we have to improve.

Most of us may have heard about the butterfly effect- the flapping of the butterfly wings can cause a cyclone elsewhere. It's the same in football and in other sports. The fitness and contribution of each and every team member is very important. It's useless to have a superb striker but a mediocre team, think of Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal team, even though a superb player in a top club, he could not win without his team mates. And it' important to be on guard each and every second of the game, till the last minute because it's the matter of victory and losing a game. Each and every team are superb and are impenetrable in perfect conditions but what each team are trying to do is searching for an opportunity to take advantage of the opposing team in a second or minute of weakness, just a small tackle, a wrong pass all matters, it's not only the strikers final kick into the goal that matters, it's the each and every tackle and pass that matters when a team is going to win, you cannot afford to leave anything to chance if you want to win.