Stay your age

The Stay Your Age Cup: FC Goa defender Sandesh Jhingan opened up about his experience with age fraud and the challenges it brought. He termed it to be damaging to players' confidence since it stems self-doubt at a critical stage of their overall football development.

Jhingan recounted personal experiences to highlight the negative impact that playing against overage footballers has on youth players during the inaugural Stay Your Age U-15 football tournament, which took place between September 12 to 18 in Navi Mumbai.

"This needs to stop. The age fraud thing has been an elephant in the room for so many years. During my younger days, in the U-15 and the U-17 times, we always knew there was someone who was older but playing in our age group. I have many times felt that I was not good enough, because that boy was stronger, faster, and more mature than me, but all of that was only because he was older than me,” Jhingan said.