‘Maidaan’ review: A halfway-there portrait of brilliant football coach Syed Abdul Rahim

Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s Maidaan runs over fertile ground – the contributions of Syed Abdul Rahim to the glory years of Indian football. The national team’s coach took the sport to heights in the 1950s and 1960s that have never been scaled since. Rahim coached the Indian team to a hard-won football gold medal in the Asian Games in 1962 despite suffering from lung cancer. He died in 1963.

Maidaan spans Rahim’s career between 1952 and 1962. The story by Saiwyn Quadras, Akash Chawla and Arunava Joy Sengupta and Quadras’s screenplay initially move at such a pace that the listed 181-minute duration appears to be a mistake.

Barely half an hour into the biopic, Rahim (Ajay Devgn) has assembled a crack team, silenced naysayers in the Football Federation of India, and turned India into a serious global competitor. But Maidaan is a long way from its terrific climax.

The film has every intention of dangling viewers keen on understanding the reasons behind Rahim’s repute. Maidaan pays heartfelt homage to Rahim, but has difficulty locating his brilliance within an overarching theme or an identifiable core.

The predecessors to Maidaan organised their conventional beats around easily digestible themes. Chak De! India (2007) was the fictitious story of a disgraced Muslim hockey coach redeeming himself by turning a rag-tag women’s team into match-winners....

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