A few weeks back, German giants Bayern Munich became the first major European club to play in India, beating Mohun Bagan 3-0 in what was also legendary goalkeeper Oliver Kahn’s last game.

The venue was the 120,000-capacity Salt Lake Stadium on the outskirts of Kolkata, the second largest stadium in the world and home to Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting.

The cavernous bowl, jam-packed to the rafters, and its dusty, bustling, noisy, typically Bengali surrounds must have seemed a world away from the spacious boulevards and quiet streets of Munich for Kahn and his team mates, but it was a stage they embraced.

The game itself went the way of the form book, Bayern in charge from start to finish, winning through Jan Schlaudraff’s double, and a Zé Roberto free-kick, though the ending was far from expected, Bagan’s Branco and Bayern’s Breno receiving red cards for fisticuffs five minutes from time.

It is not however, on the strength of the performance that Indian football will be judged, it is on whether the authorities can harness the passion and enthusiasm of the 120,000 spectators who turned out as well as the millions more who caught the game on TV.  They face a tough task.

The record of India’s national football team makes grim reading.  They have never appeared in the World Cup, though they did qualify for the 1950 tournament in Brazil, but refused to take part because of a FIFA edict that all players should wear boots.

Indeed, they were knocked out of qualifying for South Africa 2010 in October last year, losing 6-3 on aggregate to Lebanon a month before England were eliminated from Euro 2008 and three years before the finals themselves.

Their current world ranking is 151, while Pakistan are 161^st, Sri Lanka 162^nd and Bangladesh 180^th.  India’s women, however, offer some cause for celebration, ranked nearly 100 places higher than their male counterparts at 55.It has always been a mystery to British Asians not only why their national teams are so poor but also why there are so few brown faces in the Premiership.  Only one name springs to mind, Michael Chopra of Sunderland - in spite of the undoubted love for and knowledge of the game.

The contrast with cricket could not be greater, with the likes of Ravi Bopara, Vikram Solanki, Owais Shah, Sajid Mahmood and Adil Rashid all in and around the England squad, with Nasser Hussain only recently the captain. And with the advent of the Indian Premier League, the All India Football Federation’s task could become harder before it gets easier, as spectators are hooked in by the fast-paced, high-octane nature of twenty20 cricket, a fad which surely will not last.

The views of these two youngsters at the game will give the AIFF some heart. “If Bayern Munich can come down here why can football not compete with cricket?” Ramjit told the BBC. “It is just a slow ongoing process. There are kids who like watching football; they prefer it to cricket as cricket is getting boring.”

His friend Sanjay agreed: “It [football] is not as big as it once was. Every sport in this country is secondary to cricket. But it is again picking up and with Bayern Munich coming to India and Calcutta on a regular basis, it is making an impact.”

If those kids are right and the Bhangra Boys ever do make it big, we here in Britain, having failed the cricket test, may well have to answer the football test: England or India?

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