Mistreatment of champion girl footballers

That the country's under-16 girls' football team have qualified for the eight-team final round to be held in Thailand is an achievement by itself. This is a feat that has made the entire nation proud. But quite a few undesirable incidents have followed their crowning glory of emerging unbeaten champion with emphatic wins against all their opponents. First, the majority of team members who were returning home in Mymensingh by a local bus were subjected to verbal abuse. Then the father of Taslima Akhter, goalkeeper of the team, was physically assaulted by the sports teacher of the school in which she and eight of her teammates study.
The Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) has behaved callously. Why? Because the girls mostly come from underprivileged segment of society or they are simply girls who are hardly familiar with the way of life in the city! The BFF has reportedly explained that it managed an air-conditioned microbus for the girls' journey home but the girls preferred to go by local bus on the plea that some of them were prone to vomiting during such a journey. If this is so, how could they travel abroad and clinch titles there? The majority of this team played in Nepal when the quake struck. They had to travel there once again to play the final and became champion. Then they won the AFC U-14 championship in Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan. Surely they did not walk all the way to the stadiums in Kathmandu and Dushanbe.
The indifference to the champion girls was evident from the fact that they were made to stay at the BFF building when the rest of the participating teams stayed at Hotel Purbani. The reason cited was saving money. But in whose interest? How much cash-strapped is the BFF? When men's club teams get support and largesse of fat amount and its office-bearers travel abroad, money is not in short supply.  
There is hardly any parallel to the rise of girls from a village with such a background of lack of facilities and privilege. Kalsindur is that remote village which got power connection courtesy of the girls after their amazing success abroad in 2015. Theirs is a feat not matched by men's teams. Out of 47 member countries of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), they are now placed among the best eight. But at a time when they should receive all kinds of mental and physical support and be cheered, they are being harassed on way home and at school. The sports teacher even threatened with rusticating them on refusal to play a match for their school at Comilla. They refused because schedules of BFF and that match coincided.
Such acts are orchestrated, it seems, with a motive to undermine the girls. Happily, the Bangladesh Cricket Board has announced a cash award of Tk 0.1 million (1.0 lakh) for each member of the champion team. The cash-strapped BFF has not done anything of this kind yet. But the prime minister took note of the indomitable girls' success. She could not help taking a jibe at the gender-biased male chauvinists: "Boys return, conceding five goals; girls score 10 goals". She will accord a reception to them.
Her comment puts succinctly the achievements of girls vis-a-vis their senior male counterparts. If the football tradition of men's and women's teams is taken into consideration, the girls have little to show. But now they have proved themselves out of nowhere. They surely need tending in the best of game's tradition so that they can raise the bar still higher. Their budding dream now waits to flourish further in the days to come.