India's Ashalata Devi nominated for AFC 'Player of the Year' award

PUNE: Ashalata Devi, aged 7, would secretly talk football with her father, who wanted her to become a goalkeeper. Her mother didn’t know what’s brewing at the time, for the conversations were discreet to avoid the fury of her mother who wanted her daughter to read books and not play football.
Ashalata did not stop kicking the ball. She did not become a goalkeeper either.
“The scolding stopped after my selection in the under-17 national team,” said the Indian football team captain, who is among the three players to be nominated for Asian Football Confederation’s player of the year award.She is the first from India, either man or woman, to achieve this feat.
“What a year it has been,” the 26-year-old central defender from Mainpur told TOI. “To be nominated with the players who have played clinical roles for their respective countries in the World Cup, I was not expecting it at all.”
She is competing with China’s Li Ying, who was a part of the team in the Women’s World Cup in France, and Japanese midfielder Saki Kumagai, who won the Women’s Champions League for the French club Olypique Lyon, for the award.

This comes after leading Sethu FC and national team to the I-league and SAFF championship titles, respectively, this year. Ashalata also took India to the second round of AFC Olympics qualifiers, losing out in the third round on goal difference to Myanmar.
“I never thought of this because I am a defender. Most of the time strikers or midfielders bag these awards,” she said.
Just like her nomination, Ashalata’s footballing journey has sprung up surprises. Coming from Manipur, football was never a novelty but an obsession among the teens. But back then, the women were not playing competitively.
“At the age of 13-14, we started a school football tournament. I scored a penalty in the shootouts and I enjoyed it so much,” recalled Ashalata. “I didn’t know that careers could be made in football until I was 15 when I was called up for an Under-17 camp in Gwalior in 2008.”
She broke into the national team and in the same year Ashalata started playing for Manipur club Kryphsa FC. But she was forced to move out following the death of her father in 2013. “I moved to Delhi.” she said. “After his death, my mother was running a household with five of my sisters and one brother. So I found a job in Delhi where I trained kids in Modern School while practising in the evenings.”
Things started to stablise for Ashalata when she was given a job by the Railways. But the bumpy road came back to trouble her. She suffered a grade one anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and grade two medial collateral ligament (MCL) injuries in 2014.
“I was posted in Hajipur, Bihar, where there were no proper physiotherapists to treat the injury. And my muscles were getting weak since I was not playing. I didn’t have the courage to tell my mother either. I thought that this might be the end of my career,” she said.
Fortunately for Indian football, Ashalata found Dipali Pandey, a physio in Bengaluru, who treated her injury. Ashalata was called up by the Indian squad within a year in 2015. And like all fighters, she has made the most of it.
When the AFC annual awards will be announced on December 2 in Hong Kong, Ashalata will be in Kathmandu representing India in the South Asian Games that begin on December 1.
“I want to end my year with a medal over there,” she said.