‘Tiki Taka': A play that scores big on life and sports

Mint

26-06-2025

In director Adhaar Khurana's rehearsal room, actors take a break as he sketches on a piece of paper, much like a coach, the 'tiki taka"game play associated with the Spanish national football team to help an actor understand the strategy. Khurana wants everyone familiar with this game play, often criticised for being less progressive than other aggressive strategies. He need not have worried as the majority of the cast plays or loves football.
Khurana himself is a football fan and his new play Tiki Taka is one that he has been dreaming of for years. Three months back, he penned a concept note and got writers Adhir Bhat and Bobby Nagra on board. The script was delivered just three weeks before the rehearsals began in May. For Mumbai-based Akvarious Productions, which is celebrating its 25th year, this is a first-of-a-kind sports play. Though there isn't any real football action happening on stage, the characters of Abhinav and Chaitanya Sharma, brothers and footballers will be seen throwing the occasional ball around.
The play goes beyond the game. Khurana insists it's about life itself, quite like the tiki taka game play. 'It's a possession-based strategy, where a team retains the ball for as much as 70% of the time. It involves very few attacks," explains Khurana, 'though now there are versions wherein you not just retain possession but also move forward," he says.
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Tiki Taka is one of the many new efforts by Akvarious to mark its milestone year. The team is hosting a series of microfests across the country and premiering new plays such as Smile Please, Excess Estrogen and The Tragedy of Ham MacLear. Sports stories are common in film and OTT platforms but don't always make their way to the stage. While it is difficult to replicate game play on stage, Khurana believes that theatre as a medium fuelled by audience imagination, can be an asset for these stories.
Like most sports stories, Tiki Taka begins in the locker room. The India football team captain, Paramjeet Gill, played by Chaitanya Sharma, is set for his last match before retirement. This is a prestigious final in a tournament where the Indian team is a surprise entrant. His brother, Amarjeet Gill (Abhinav Sharma), is a footballer too. He is not on the team but hopes to make the cut soon. Then there's the coach, Farooq Bukhari (Faisal Rashid), a Kashmiri Muslim with a challenging personal and professional life who is out to prove himself and win a custody battle.
The list of characters includes Etienne Mascarenhas (Joy Fernandes), a forgotten Goan football hero, now a kitman who can't help living in past glory. There's a TV anchor with funny, sometimes scathing, commentary of the matches. There's Tamannah Kataria (Lisha Bajaj), a physiotherapist holding her own in a man's world. Khurana was keen on introducing a female character, who could inhabit a male-dominated space. Each character has a life on and off the field. There's a lot of politics in both the professional and personal realms.
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As a fan, Khurana was fussy about getting the details right but knew that the play had to rest on its drama. A strand of the central plot has been inspired from a news event. In March, Kalyan Chaubey, the All India Football Federation president, spoke about integrating Overseas Citizenship of India card holders into the Indian team. In the play, this exercise is shown as close to completion. The fictional federation chief is banking on the team's loss to pass the new regulation. Except, the team has made it to the finals. The events that follow create the drama in the play.
There's commentary about testosterone-heavy boys locker rooms, a comeuppance for the sole female character, and about sport and sportsmanship. Khurana doesn't preach, wants the laughs, but above all wants to remind viewers that there is more to Indian sport than cricket.
For the last few years, we've seen somewhat of an outpouring of sports documentaries, films and series on OTT platforms, including the runaway success of Apple TV's Ted Lasso. Khurana, though, insists he drew inspiration from none of them. 'I love Ted Lasso; the beauty therein is that you don't see a lot of the game. It's centred around the lives of the people," he says. Tiki Taka, which opened to a full house at Mumbai's AntiSocial on a Tuesday evening is similar in its attempts. It's the men in the locker room, behind the numbered jerseys, and not the ones on the field that took the applause.
Tiki Taka is all set to be staged on 27 June in Pune, and will be staged again in July and August. Akvarious Productions is also hosting its third microfest until June 29 at The Box, Pune.
Prachi Sibal is a Mumbai-based culture writer.