Striker: Stopper

by Moti Nandi, Suman Tarafdar, Taneesha Kulshresta

Striker is the story of a young football player, Prasoon Joshi, whose father, once a top scorer in the Calcutta League is completely sidelined after being accused by the club he played for of deliberately throwing the winning goal. As a young player struggling to make his mark, Prasoon not only has to battle the ruthless exploitation of the football clubs, his family's straitened financial circumstances, and his own development as a player, but he has also to exorcise his father's ghosts. Stopper, on the other hand, is the story of the much older Kamal Guha, a veteran player with an eclectic record, now playing the final game of his career...

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2010

About the author

Moti Nandi was a sports journalist and worked as a sports editor in Anandabazar Patrika. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award (2008) at a glittering ceremony to mark the grand finale of the maiden edition of the Excellence in Journalism Awards.

In his novels, he is noted for his depiction of sporting events and many of his protagonists are sports-persons. His first short story was published in Desh weekly on 1957. His story for Pujabarshiki was in Parichoy Magazine on 1985.

Reviews

[Anuradha Goyal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed Review here https://www.anuradhagoyal.com/striker...

[Shreela Sen · Rating 5 out of 5]

These novellas have been written in 1973 & 1974. They are not great stories, but the pack the entire punch of sports fiction. Or maybe I am biased. I have grown up in the 1990s reading the later novellas of Moti Nandy in the Poojaabaarshiki Anondomela. Never disappointed, the sports fiction, (by Bollywood too, by the way) are high dramas. What I love about Moti Nandy, though, is that the hero/heroine is not necessarily a super successful star at the end of the story, but definitely a winner in his/her life.
Do not know if per-teens today will connect to the dirt-poor, starving main protagonists, but I hope they do, humanity & human emotions are expected to be universal after all. Also, this year’s Poojaabaarshiki Anondomela carried a story about a dirt poor Archer…
The translation is seamlessly smooth, in very simple language yet not simplistic.