The Beautiful Game Everywhere
Dhrumil Dhakan's lens catches people playing football at different places, different times, using different materials.
Everyone loves football; so do I. My tryst with football started in quite a funny manner. When I got my first phone at the tender age of 13, a sleek Blackberry, I was quite confused about what my wallpaper should be. I looked around but unfortunately, found nothing interesting.
That’s when my friend, Daksh, transferred a few wallpapers via Bluetooth. The one I found the coolest was a graphic of a certain someone named Lionel Messi. I did not know him, but found the graphic to be quite cool and used it as wallpaper.
This casual encounter started my journey with this beautiful game, and I have so many memories through the years of exciting, passionate and heartbreaking moments of watching football on screen.
But my favourite football moments happen on the field itself, playing, falling, and getting injured. There was a time I ran with the ball like we were binary stars, never touching but bound together, and when I finally kicked the ball, it was to put it past the goalkeeper’s legs and inside the net, or when I passed the ball across the field to my best friend, Krutik, who attempted a header but missed by inches.
Dribbling is a hit or miss for me but it always feels great to try and oh, that feeling when you manage to go past your opponent with a slick move, feeling like a magician.
Playing football always felt the best when we were playing with make-shift things such as a tennis ball, rocks, paper balls, or anything except a football, and anywhere except a playground or a turf.
Using a deflated ball to play a game of nutmeg, where we try to kick the ball from between the opponent’s legs, with my brother at home. Making a make-do ball with the empty juice tetra pack and playing a 5v5 in our classroom at school.
And then we used the actual ball to play a game with 30 other classmates during the P.T. period, hoping you'd get to touch the ball in a crowd of 10, which created a cloud of dust around the group.
Gathering strangers at the local ground and playing football with people that ranged from 11 years old to 30 years old. Sometimes, we would not take their numbers and still meet them again at the same spot without a word exchanged.
It was this feeling of magic that I felt when playing the beautiful game which I wanted to capture with the lens, to capture the ‘beautiful’ of the game. I went to places like beaches, grounds, turfs, places where I would play myself and capture that feeling from someone else.