It's easy to assume a footballing kid was always a footballing kid. Avyaan wasn't. His first academy was cricket — and the story of how he got to football is really the story of him choosing it for himself.
The natural pull was always there, but the first organised sport we put him in was cricket. It didn't take. Three months in, he'd had enough, and we let him leave — no drama, no lecture.
Then came six months of nothing in particular: wandering the society with his friends, a ball at his feet more often than not, football happening the way it happens to most kids — in the gaps, unsupervised, for fun. We didn't push. We waited.
One day he came to me and said it plainly: I want to play football. That was it. We signed him up at the academy right there in the society, and not long after, he played his first tournament. Everything on this site grows from that one sentence he chose to say.
Still a cricket house
Choosing football didn't mean leaving cricket behind. It's still very much in the house — his elder brother trains and plays it, we watch the IPL and the big tournaments together, and a lot of our shared family evenings are still built around a cricket match on the screen. He picked his game; he didn't have to give up the other one.
The point of keeping this one at the front: nobody handed him football. He wandered his way to it and then asked for it — and that's a very different thing from being placed in it.