Bawa’s team - the Children’s Academy - players do eat their ‘thepla and achar’ before the match sans warm up, but they fight hard for the ball. They might not be sporting best of kits with the right numbers behind but what matters to them is the name written in front of their jerseys.

Last year, they reached semi-final of the MSSA hockey tournament and this year too they have managed to enter the play-offs. In their last match of the league played at the St Stanislaus ground, they were leading 1-0 as Yash Kabra struck in the 15th minute, but later last year’s under-12 champions_St Stanislaus pulled one back. Mukul Khilani scored in the 26th minute for the hosts off a penalty corner to draw the match 1-1.

His boys look determined to win this season, but Bawa has his reservations and says, “The boys can be very unpredictable. They drew their last encounter with a below-par team like Our lady of Home, Dadar.”

But the boys are now inspired. They have come up playing hockey partly on a cement surface, which is one fourth of the St Stanislaus ground. But that fact does not deter them. One of them says, “If we play well, Bawa is planning to build goal with posts for us.” All these years they had used cones as their goal posts.

They were also excited about a ground that Bawa was supposed to book for their practice. Though some of the players travel all the way to BHA, Churchgate but most of them are not allowed from home. So a nearby playing ground could solve their problem.