Playing politics with football

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Stand By is angry and it's in dogged pursuit of the answer to one question if finds baffling: Why haven’t 1.2 billion people won a single Olympic gold in group sport for 25 years?

Stand By knows why, but it wants us to know as well, in great detail, leaving no room for any shaq or sawal. To this end, director Sanjay Surkar succeeds.
We have, of course, known the answer all along, but sometimes got distracted by stories about the lack of talent, or nonsense peddled about Indians being crap at contact sport because of caste, culture and physique. Stand By fixes that. We emerge from the hall convinced that the answer to the Olympic question is far simpler: politicians running sports bodies and their henchmen don’t pick the best players. They pick kids of rich and powerful men who can oblige them when required, with cash or in kind.
This may sound dreary, and yet Stand By is anything but. It has a predictable but nice story, centred around the game of football and the fight between talent and money. This tussle is played out by two close friends, Rahul Narvekar (Adinath Kothare) and Shekhar Verma (Siddharth Kher).
Rahul is the son of Damodar (Sachin Khedekar), a bank employee and a former football player. They live in a chawl. Shekhar is the son of Jayprakash (Dalip Tahil), a rich industrialist. He likes red cars, whiskey and his bungalow has a pool. Damodar is always telling Rahul to focus on the game; Jayprakash is always consoling Shekhar and promising to fix things. Shekhar’s father talks to him about getting him into the European League, while Rahul’s father discusses strategy for the next match. 
Shekhar and Rahul are both in the Maharashtra state football team. Shekhar is the team’s captain and Rahul is the team’s best player.
Maharashtra wins the all-India Santosh Trophy and Rahul is hailed by commentators as India’s "golden boot" while Shekhar’s performance and attitude are criticised.
The Indian Football Association announces the India team — Rahul is in, Shekhar is standby.
Jayprakash swings into action, using every possible trick and pull. President of the association is told it’s in his best interest to ensure that Shekhar gets into the team. Coach John Williams (Manish Choudhary) is approached, but he warms them not to meddle with his team. Players are offered money, plots to injure a player are hatched, Rahul is lured with cushy job offers, his father is framed in a case of fraud and then things get really bad.
In this wretched world of needy players and slimy politicians the only one who stands upright is coach John. He observes, doesn’t talk much, but when he does, he shoots straight and hard.
STAND BY is a simple story told through stereotypical characters — rich people bad, poor people good. What works for the film is that we, the audience, are enlisted as witnesses for the prosecution — we live with the Narvekars in the chawl and are emotionally attached to the football-crazy father and son.
The four main characters who carry the film are efficient — the two dads fit their world and roles comfortably, and the boys playing their two sons are competent, though Siddharth Kher is better than Adinath Kothare. There are some nice scenes on the football field, and the two boys living two separate lives, with two separate sets of values, is neatly done.
My main quibble is with director Sanjay Surkar's need to make us angry. His rather routine story takes an entirely unconvincing tragic twist at the end, and I still can’t figure out why he felt the need to overstate that there’s intrigue in the aisles of stadiums through an absurd dance-drama sequence involving men and women in feathers and bones swaying on a chess board. Silly.