Gokulam Kerala writes to PM, dials sports ministry, gets 48-hour extension at Tashkent

He mulled dialing the sports ministry, writing to the Prime Minister, getting the Committee of Administrators (CoA) involved, buying time from the Asian Football Confederation. He was desperate to pull out all the stops to see his players avoid the humiliation of returning from Tashkent without playing, barely hours after arriving there as a team about to become the first club to represent India in AFC Women's Club Championship.

After giving it much thought, Praveen decided, instead of him dialing New Delhi from Kerala, it will be the team that should make the call, from the Uzbekistan capital to the sports ministry here. The team manager spoke as the players stood beside as a tight-knit unit adamant on not giving up hope in a game they were not expecting to be part of. The impassioned plea worked, as the ministry promptly took up the matter with the AFC, which offered the team an extension of 48 hours in Tashkent. So, instead of taking the next flight back home, the team from India continued to stay in a country where it has gone with lots of hope. "It's about expressing the emotions, we calling them is fine but the team making the call from there is different. So we thought the players would have to be part of the call. The ministry acted immediately and got in touch with the AFC," Praveen told PTI on Wednesday. While he let the players surround his team manager as he called Delhi, the club's president decided to write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and apprised him about the helpless situation his players found themselves after world football governing body FIFA move to ban India for "undue third party interference". "The girls are suffering for no fault of theirs, it's so sad. This (ban) was so sudden, this was not