TAGBANGER | Central Asia

by Jennifer Doyle
The New York Times

GOA, India — When the Indian women’s national team takes the field against Sri Lanka on Friday in the South Asian Games, it will be its first soccer match in two years.

India’s national soccer association had failed to schedule a friendly match for its women’s team since October 2007. And last June, FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, sent a rebuke to the All India Football Federation and, with no matches to evaluate, removed the Indian team from its world rankings.

The delisting seemed to move Indian soccer officials to action.

The team was reassembled in late November for a two-month training camp in Margao, Goa, home of one of India’s few artificial-turf fields.

While the men’s national team arrived by plane and stayed in five-star accommodations for its camp, the women’s team — a mixture of veteran and new players — traveled by train for as many as five days and was packed three to a room in a dormitory. The women had no training uniforms when they arrived and did their own laundry.

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