The grass at the Cooperage Football ground in Mumbai is set to get greener,thanks to artificial turf (costing between $500,000 to $600,000) sanctioned by the FIFA.
Eric Harrison and Chrisantha Perera, two FIFA officials, visited the ground on Friday morning from Bangalore, along with All India Football Federation (AIFF) outgoing general secretary Alberto Colaco.The various parameters such as drainage ,security etc were upto the mark – and so they gave the er… green signal.
This interesting historical snippet on the grounds reveals the following..
The Cooperage Grounds along with the Oval Grounds, Parade Grounds (Azad Maidan) and Cross Grounds were once a single stretch called the Bombay Esplanade Grounds, built as an open ground to provide the British India Military an open field of fire against the Malabar pirates who used to plague the nascent city and against the Dutch, Marathas and Sidi Sultan of Janjira who made several attempts to conquer Bombay from the English.
More history here..
Cooperage will be getting the turf under FIFA’s Win in India with India programme.
Win in India with India is going to concentrate on developing Indian football at elite level, namely the top two divisions in India.The greening of the turf is one small step for FIFA and one giantish kind of step for Indian Football – hopefully.