Thursday 25 / April / 2024
When Saurav Gopalakrishnan completed his exams at the end of Grade 10, little did he know that it would be the end of his schooling. To most of us, dropping out of school may be one of the worst things we can imagine. School is, after all, where we first begin to plan for our successes. But while most of our successes depend on being in the classroom, Saurav’s depended on him being outside it.
Today, Saurav is a professional footballer in Spain, and is working hard towards realising his childhood dream of playing the beautiful game for a living.
An alumnus of Indian School Muscat, Saurav plays for Club Deportivo Almunecar in Spain, a rather unique, all-inclusive club that was only formed last summer. The club formed a partnership with the FC Malaga City Pro Season Academy to provide academy graduates a direct route into first-team football.
Saurav and his mother Seeta spoke in an exclusive series of interviews with Times of Oman, about how he was able to work towards his footballing dream, and what lies ahead.
“My earliest memory was watching the Premier League, and my favourite team at that time was Manchester United, who had a certain young man called Cristiano Ronaldo,” said Saurav. “It just began from there. From that moment on, I just realised what I wanted to do. To see him just bamboozle players on the pitch and put on a show for the crowd straight away just stayed in my mind, and I told myself that this is what I wanted to do. I was around 12 or 13 years old at that time.”
But what were the reactions of Saurav’s parents when he told them this was the path he wanted to follow?
“It wasn’t a straight ‘no’ nor was it a resounding ‘yes’, it was more of an in-between ‘don’t you have something else to do?’ sort of thing,” he recalled. “It wasn’t taken as seriously, and I understand that they needed some time to be able to do that. I was driven. It was all I wanted to do ever since I can remember. To me, it was all a dream come true. All I ever wanted was to capitalise on this opportunity because it was unfolding before my eyes, and I wanted to make the most of what I had been given.”
This was no flash-in-the-pan vision that Saurav had before him. His mum always had an inkling about just how serious he was about becoming a pro footballer.
“He was very keen on sports and was always a part of every single team in ISM, representing the school and travelling to India, missing his exams,” said Seeta. “In fact, there was this one time when he was asked to travel to represent the school in sports really close to the final exams, and we didn’t want him to go, but the principal called and intervened and asked us to allow him to go. He went, came back, and did well in the exams as well. He was into every sport, but you don’t think so far, and we just did things to the best of our ability.”
“He was constantly into athletics and football. Every morning and evening saw me dropping him and picking him up, and there were times when I had to drop him in the morning for sports, pick him up, drop him back to attend school, and then sometimes drop him off to play the drums in the evening, which he was also learning at the time,” she added. At that time his father was in Dubai and I was here. I would like to think I was close to being a superwoman because I was living here with two children. Later, his older brother also went to India, and then it was just the two of us,” she said.
The close relationship between mother and son played a key role in putting Saurav on his ambitious path to the top.
“At that time, every day, he would come up to me and say ‘I want to play professional football, can you check out something for me?’ and this went on for a couple of months when he was in class 10,” recalled his mum. “The board exams got over and he kept asking me, until one day, he came to me and told me ‘mum, I have found something in the UK. It is a two-month summer programme, so, can I go?’ This was great because children need to take initiative, show their passion and then the path becomes clear. Like any typical Indian parent, we too said ‘at least finish your schooling’.”
Like any parent, Saurav’s family too had many things to consider before watching him embark on this potentially life-changing journey. To an Indian parent, academic excellence and a stable job so that you can provide for yourself and your family come first, after all.
“I quickly shot an email and it seemed very affordable, and the summer break was coming up so I let him go, and I think it was sort of meant to be,” said Seeta. “He was just a kid at that time and here in Oman, we live a pretty closeted existence and he went there and it was really cold.
It was quite a big thing for us to send him away, and for him to survive there. The meals, for example, were different but he adapted so easily, and at the end of those two months, the next step for him was to come back home, but we said ‘what next?’ For me as a mother, I just could not visualise Saurav sitting in the classroom through a humanities lesson.”
Saurav would never sit for another lesson ... in Muscat that is. What was to come to him was the stuff dreams are made of, and will be continued next week.
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