Director: Vivek Agnihotri

Stars: John Abraham, Boman Irani, Bipasha Basu.

England are out of the Euro 2008 football championships but the beautiful game continues to fascinate with this Bollywood football film set entirely in London.

Southall United Football Club are on the verge of closure. They have not won a match in years and they are facing bankruptcy. Will their new coach Tony (Boman Irani) and a spunky new striker Sunny (John Abraham), rejuvenate the team’s fortunes?

Forget about the football; director Vivek Agnihotri attempts social critique on racism in the sport in the UK. His regressive and worrying message is clear: we may be British Asians but we are Indians firstly and must stick together in order to progress.

“You should play with your own people” is the advice given to British Asian Sunny when he aligns himself with the largely white Aston football club. When he is not selected by Aston, Sunny realises the error of his western ways. He finds his roots by declaring:”I may not live in India but I have not stopped being an Indian.” He promptly joins the all Asian Southall United FC.

This confused cultural message is reinforced by the film’s depiction of white British people as racists who frequently shout “go back to where you came from Paki’. Blonde women are portrayed as babes in bikinis who frolic on the beach in mid-winter clad in skimpy bikinis and wear equally revealing attire inside pubs. But it is apparently acceptable for an Asian character to refer to non-Asians as ‘English twits’.

Like the locations, which switch inexplicably from Southall to East Ham to Brick Lane, the depiction of the sport is similarly erratic. There is a blatant disregard for the basic rules of the game: no one is ever off-side, there are no linesmen and at one point, the football commentator pronounces a 6-nil result as ‘6- zero’. Incredibly, the cost of admission to a match in 2007 is £6!

The obligatory love interest Rumana (Bipasha Basu) as the team’s physiotherapist is reduced to sticking band-aids on injuries and her precocious nature is left unexplored. Similarly, positive comment on the admirable communal aspect of the Punjabi Sunny and Muslim Rumana relationship is ignored.

Predictable from the first kick to the final result, this Bend it Like Beckham and Chak De! India wannabe with its unoriginal ‘underdog emerging victorious’ theme, fails to score. Everyone involved with this missed Goal deserve red cards.

PG, 165 mins, Subtitles.

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